A coaching client asked me just yesterday about creating accountability. Accountability is an important component of your systems.
When you do the work of defining the best way to do something you want to make sure it’s being done that way and working as expected.
For non-reactive tasks – the things that simply must be done in your agency every day, week, month – I support 100% accountability.
That is … Accountability Checklists that list all those tasks …
Procedural documentation for each task explaining how to do it …
And assignment to team members who complete and submit the checklists to management.
For reactive tasks – things that come up when they come up like service calls – there’s more of a continuum.
The level of accountability will vary from process to process depending on your personal preferences.
At the bottom of the scale is doing nothing – no documentation, no accountability. There’s way too much of this going on already!
Moving up you can document your standards and expectations for a process.
Here you document how you expect your team to behave. Little accountability, but at least everyone knows what’s expected.
Next up the continuum is a process summary. With this you document the flow of a process in general terms of what gets done and who does it.
After that you get into detailed procedures. Now you’re spelling out how to perform each step of the process in detail.
And at the top of the scale you can implement process checklists. These are interactive tools that guide your staff through a process step by step.
Which approach is right for you? As I said, it will vary from process to process.
Some things are so important, and perhaps complex, that you want total control over the process each time. A process checklist is the way to go.
But you also have to recognize that too many process checklists can be counter-productive. And you have other documentation levels you can use.
There are no hard and fast rules here. Only what makes sense to you for a given process in your agency…
Balancing the importance and complexity of a process with the level of accountability desired.
For an explanation of each type of documentation look at the archives for August & September 2009.
