WITH A CHECKLIST APP AGAINST THE PANDEMIC

We all keep wondering when the corona pandemic nightmare is going to end. When will we finally be able to interact with more living souls than just our cat and ourselves in the mirror? We don’t know the answer yet, but definitely, there is something you can do to downsize the number of corona infections. Just download a digital checklist app!

WHAT’S WRONG WITH MANUAL CHECKLISTS THEN? WHY CHECKLIST APP?

“Safety first”, as we all know. During the times of the pandemic, it is crucial to watch that everyone keeps to the rules, that the facilities are regularly inspected and the issues are controlled. Perhaps, it is possible to supervise safety with pen & paper when you don’t need to take immediate action or where the results of your mistakes are not that influential.

For example, if you check how many left socks are missing in your wardrobe, it will not be the end of the world if you lose the paper on which you were taking down your calculations. This is a ridiculous example, but it shows that using pen & paper can be truly of help only for these small ridiculous checks.

At the times when an empty bottle of sanitizer may mean +100 people entering the store without washing their hands and the eventual infection number rising in a geometrical progression, our inspection tool should let us be swift, adaptable and cooperative to eliminate deficiencies as soon as they arise. So how can a digital checklist app help?

1. MORE INSPECTIONS DONE, MORE ISSUES RAISED — MORE DISEASE CASES PREVENTED

Today businesses must do inspections much more often and thoroughly than they used to. For example, if before the pandemic one daily hygiene check was enough for a restaurant, now there should be an inspection every hour to ensure the proper disinfection of all the premises.

Filling out Excel sheets every hour sounds quite tough. Printing out checklists so often for so many people is waving “bye-bye” to Amazon rainforests. A checklist app seems to be the best alternative already because:

• You can save an unlimited number of inspections in the app. The app storage is mostly cloud-based which means that you can do an unlimited number of checks. What is more, the data is never lost!
• The more inspections are done, the more issues are spotted. In this case, quantity equals quality. An increased number of checks performs as a guarantee of identifying issues quickly.
• You can let your team know immediately. Send them a notification on their phone about too many people without a mask in the building and they will come to take measures before the virus spreads all over the crowd.

2. CHECKLIST APP MEANS: BEING AWARE OF UPDATES

With the rules changing every single week, it is essential to be in sync with all the new requirements. This means that your checklist should also be regularly updated with the consideration of new norms. Correcting those manually can be quite time-consuming.

What you could do is using the COVID-19 templates from inspection apps. Content writers are obliged to ensure that these checklists follow the newest regulations. Therefore, you will save time and will be able to concentrate on something more important than checking the compliance of your inspection sheets every other day.

In case you would like to be more autonomous and if you do not trust content writers that much (though, personally for me it would hurt), you can of course follow the news yourself. In particular, the alerts from the Foreign Ministry of Affairs, and the National Health Ministry of one country. You can even set up news alerts in such a way that they come to your email inbox directly. In this case, you can create new checklists yourself from scratch with the updates you think are necessary to include.

3. ANALYZING YOUR MISTAKES WITH A CHECKLIST APP

Which issues occurred most often? If there was not enough of sanitizer, maybe it should be supplied in a bigger quantity? If too many people are entering a building without a mask, maybe there are not enough signs or workers in the entrance saying about the safety rules of a place?

At these extreme times, the motto should be: identify, analyze and notify. Again, this means presenting audit analytics more often to your team to let them know which sorts of problems they encounter on a regular basis. As an option, you can consider using the analytics feature in your checklist app which will show you the trends for issues in the form of both numbers and graphs for visual presentation.

4. CONSISTENCY IS OUR KEY TO SUCCESS!

It is important to do safety inspections regularly and with the same interval of time. Make a schedule for your employees and assign certain tasks to all of your workers instead of just safety managers. This will help to distribute the tasks equally and will make the increased safety regulations less overwhelming for your inspectors. In addition, there will be a bigger chance that the procedures will be done properly if more people are responsible for this.

If you own, for example, a bakery chain, it is a good idea to consider a tool which will help you supervise all the sites to the same extent. This is another benefit of a checklist app: you can sort your checks by location and you avoid the mess with your safety documentation.

TECHNOLOGY IS OUR WAY THROUGH THE PANDEMIC

If the applications like Zoom or Microsoft teams keep our communication channel and education going, if Netflix is providing us with entertainment and Takeaway.com with food, a digital checklist tool is ensuring the following: us, our friends and family staying healthy. And agree with me, this is something worth our attention now.