Guidelines and checklists are two things most people tend to hate starting from high school and college. Everyone remembers those long and boring guidelines for writing texts, doing lab reports, following the formatting style rules, etc. Since then, most people, even business owners, try to avoid both writing or reading guidelines, even if these are to their brand new shiny expensive phone, laptop, or car. This dislike for guidelines seems to be in our blood.
However, successful businesses that function and bring profit are systems, and to operate any system, one needs guidelines. If you look around for successful companies in different industries and niches, you will find out that the majority of them offer comprehensive guidelines even for their customers, not to mention their employees. Entertainment websites provide guidelines similar to onlinecasinoguide.co.nz to make sure their customers have a smooth experience; let alone other businesses should do so! Therefore, you need guidelines and checklists to grow your business.
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Why Guidelines?
Guidelines are important, first of all, for any new person you hire or start cooperating with. Perhaps it is okay just to explain everything yourself for one person, or two, or five, once. But what if you have to hire 50 people, one by one? Then fire some, then hire again… Obviously, you will go crazy explaining everything every time. Guidelines are also helpful to quickly get back to them and check this or that issue and rules applying to it, instead of running back to the person who explained everything back then.
Also, with time, processes and procedures in your business will become more complicated, and sooner or later, you will be forced to sit and write guidelines for everything. But it will be much easier to build this complexity upon more primitive documents you already have, instead of giving birth to this huge guideline monster for a corporation that already exists for three years.
So, guidelines are:
- convenient;
- save time, energy and money;
- allow keeping everything written down;
- allow to increase the complexity of processes and procedures.
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Why Checklists?
Checklists are easier than guidelines because they are created for checking the results of the work done. But these, too, are created in most cases on the basis of well-developed and comprehensive guidelines, so you will still probably need to make those first. So, checklists allow to check all important issues, nuances and aspects point by point, which is especially useful if the task included different activities of different levels, that is, not automatic work.
Checklists are also useful to make sure the product or outcome meets the needed criteria. In some cases, checklists can replace guidelines – yay! – for simpler procedures. But how will those help grow the business? Easily – by helping you to make sure you did everything you wanted, correctly, and followed your own requirements and standards of quality.
While guidelines describe how and why one should do this or that, checklists can demand specific criteria to be met, like not simple “done”, but “functions”, or better “attracts 50 new visitors per day”. Without guidelines, employees don’t know what to do; without checklists, it is impossible to check how everything was done. So, write some guidelines and checklists to grow your business.
