To some degree, errors will always occur in business. People aren’t perfect, systems aren’t without their flaws, and – despite your hardest efforts – mistakes still happen. It’s important to remember that making mistakes can provide you and your staff with an excellent opportunity for development and growth. There’s nothing wrong with some trial and error.
The problem comes when you find your organisation is making unnecessary and troublesome mistakes consistently. If this sounds familiar, there are plenty of ways to minimise and prevent human error. Ways to avoid the unnecessary mistakes that slow your business down and halt its productivity. We’ve collected a few of our tops tips below.
Reducing miscommunication
You want to create streamlined communication across your organisation. Productivity is boosted by 25% in well-connected organisations. And 28% of employees cite poor communication as their reason for not delivering a project on time.
You want to incorporate tools and systems that ensure you can easily contact anyone within your workforce. To reduce miscommunications and errors, you need to be contacting the right people, at the right time, with the right information.
You also want targeted communication; to be able to reach out to a few relevant people and share the specific information they need. If you bombard your entire workforce with every piece of information you have to share, chances are there will be some conflicting information and confusion to follow.
A well-oiled communication system keeps everyone within your organisation on the same page. You can be confident everyone receives the correspondence they need to do their jobs effectively and efficiently.
More effective onboarding and training
Improving your onboarding and training process helps improve confidence and competence across your workforce. For example, having a cloud-based system that keeps all the important documentation to hand and easily accessible for new starters. If there’s ever any doubt over what to do, your staff can reference these materials and respond accordingly. It prevents them from playing a guessing game or assuming they know what to do and making mistakes.
Alternatively, the very same communication system that reduced miscommunication above can create clear, open channels for your more senior staff to guide new employees when they’re in doubt.
Simple, straightforward task management
We make fewer errors when everyone knows what they’re doing. If every department, team, and individual is crystal clear on what’s expected of them, there’s less room for things to go wrong.
The right tools allow your staff to take ownership of their workload, visualising all tasks, deadlines, and upcoming work. You’ll find staff feel more productive, motivated, and confident when they can manage their own time.
High-stress situations can also lead to avoidable mistakes. Someone panics and does something they already know not to do because tensions are so high. Seamless organisational tools like this help to manage staff stress levels. With full oversight of their daily, weekly, or monthly schedule and workload, they’re less likely to feel overwhelmed and make unnecessary mistakes.
Preparing for the worst
As we said at the beginning, errors are to be expected. They’re part and parcel of running a large organisation. So wouldn’t it be easier to have systems and procedures in place just in case something was to go wrong? For example, a system that makes it easy to reach out to the whole organisation or specific departments to reiterate information or protocol.
By making sure you can quickly visualise when something’s gone wrong and communicate with the relevant people to ensure it doesn’t happen again, you minimise the impact errors have on your business. The quicker you can resolve them, the sooner you get back on track.
While errors across your organisation won’t often spell complete disaster, they’re never ideal. They slow you down and can hold you back. And while there’s a lot to be said for learning through trial and error, any simple ways to reduce or minimise errors will be beneficial for productivity, staff engagement, profitability, and business longevity.
Inform People is an intuitive platform that keeps multi-site organisations streamlined, secure, and informed. With everything you need in one easy-to-use place, and powerful automation keeping your organisation on track, large-scale organisations see reduced errors, improved productivity, and greater profitability. To find out what we can do for you, get in touch on +44 (0)161 713 4104 or via email.
