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MetricsSuzie Housley, Ph.D.
Product Owner
July 9th, 2024 by Suzie Housley, Ph.D.
Lately, we have been talking a lot on the blog about the importance of checklists. Atul Gawande, the author of ‘The Checklist Manifesto’ reminds us that although simple, checklists work! Even the most specialized professionals like pilots and doctors can rely on this simple tool to improve their performance and reduce risk.
‘The Checklist Manifesto: How to get things right’ goes on to explain, that while vital, not all checklists are created equal:
“There are good checklists and bad… Bad checklists are vague and imprecise. They are too long; they are hard to use; they are impractical. They are made by desk jockeys with no awareness of the situations in which they are to be deployed”
“Good checklists, on the other hand, are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations.”
I’m sure those of you who have attempted to utilize checklists as part of your Environmental, Health, and Safety (EHS) program have experienced this. One area within EHS that makes regular use of checklists is inspection programs. In essence, an inspection is simply a checklist, and like any checklist there are good ones and bad ones. Today we’ll explore three tips to help you make sure your EHS inspection checklists are GREAT!
As mentioned, good checklists are precise. This means that we need to know the exact goal of the inspection before creating the form. It sounds so simple it should go without saying. But often, we’re so eager to get to the task at hand that we skip over the step where we stop to determine WHY we are doing this in the first place. Determining your goal can take some research on the front end.
If your goal is to make sure you’re in compliance with a particular regulation, you may need to determine what part of the regulation applies to your facility. If your goal is to support a corporate sustainability initiative, you may need to gather some corporate goals and guidelines. If your goal is proactive risk reduction, you may need to not only understand the guidelines and regulations- but also be able to back them up a few steps so you can check for indications something may be heading the wrong direction before a regulation is actually violated.
If you don’t take the time to determine your goal before writing your checklist, you may end up with a list that’s either too specific or too vague for your purposes.
Inspection Templates created in Dakota Inspections with clear goals documented
Knowing your goal before creating a checklist will help you be more precise because your overall goal will dictate the level of urgency and detail that need to go into your checklist. For example if your goal is compliance with a strict regulation, you’ll need to ask more pointed and specific questions than if your goal is a more general sweep of the facility. You may find that you need to do both of these things at your facility from time to time.
Adopting a methodology of using precise checklists with clear goals would mean you’d create a separate checklist for each goal, one to check compliance with the regulation you need to meet, and another for your more general observations. Keeping each checklist distinct will help you quickly identify and fix issues in a more targeted way, it will also help those reviewing inspection reports prioritize any corrective actions required.
Just as we want our checklist of inspection questions to be focused and precise, we also want our method of answering those questions to be quick and to-the-point. An inspection checklist is not the place for open-ended questions or long essay-like responses. There are several different ways to create a scoring system; the one that works best for you will depend on the overall goal of your inspection.
Some good methods for scoring inspections include:
Yes/ No
Pass/ Fail/ Warning
If you’re checking to make sure you’re in compliance with a strict regulation, a more binary system like yes/no or pass/ fail might be a good choice for you. If you have some room for interpretation or are looking to catch things proactively, a rating system or options with a warning in addition to pass/ fail may better suit your needs.
Inspection Checklists created using Dakota Inspections that utilize different scoring systems
A rating system makes it easy for the inspector to answer the question. They can select a response and move on. They may need to add some images or extra information, but the overall answer can be added quickly and, importantly, is not open to interpretation.
The distinctness of a scoring system vs. open ended answers also makes it easier for those reviewing inspection documentation. They should be able to quickly scan the inspection and see where issues are without having to dive into additional documentation.
We want our inspection checklists to be precise and simple. However, we don’t want them to be so stripped down that our inspectors are left scratching their heads wondering why they are asking a particular question, or what the impact of a failed response is.
A simple way to do this is to provide a citation if the question is related to a particular regulation, or some points to remind the inspector of the regulatory or corporate guidelines. What we’d want to avoid here is quoting an entire regulation in all of its legalese glory into the checklist.
Checklist completed in Dakota Inspections with citations noted for each question
This small bit of context is helpful for the inspector because it lets them know the weight of their answer. If there is a failing response on a question related to meeting a strict environmental regulation, that carries a different weight than a failed response on a more general question. Having that context right there with the question helps those answering and those reviewing the inspection determine the urgency of any corrective actions that need to take place.
Reading through these tips may give you some ideas for where your inspection checklists are hitting the mark, and where they could maybe be made over to make them more helpful for your team. We’d love to help! At Dakota, we kept all of these guidelines in mind while designing our new inspections application.
Our system allows you to build sharable and reusable inspection checklists that can be used across your organization. We can help you narrow down your goal and provide regulatory context with our library of over 500 inspection questions curated by our subject matter experts. We also provide a flexible selection of scoring systems to keep answering and reviewing inspections as clear and precise as possible.
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