Mistakes happen.
You might miss something, or someone on your team overlooks a high-priority incident – like a heart attack.
We know this.
You know this!
Every operation has its good days and bad.
You’re going to have those mishaps that leave you frustrated.
It happens.
Nothing to stress over, right?
It’s how you react to them that matters, right?
Wrong.
What’s your justification when this happens all the time?
That’s not minor.
That’s not a one-time “oops.”
How do you evaluate the readiness of your operation when incidents are regularly slipping through the cracks?
It’s obvious; your incident management isn’t up to snuff.
We’d venture to say that if you’re always reacting to what’s occurring throughout your property – you’re making a few major mistakes.
Keep reading; we believe we know which ones and how to solve them.
4 Mistakes Operations Make
We’ve learned quite a bit about what it takes to run a first-class operation over the years of working with top-notch professionals.
Building a proactive operation, rather than a reactive one takes some skill.
So, who better to learn from than other proactive operations?
Interestingly enough, the ones that are operating at maximum performance have four qualities in common.
So, if you’re missing any of these, that’s a problem we’re going to help you fix today.
You could be making these four mistakes that threaten your incident management:
- Not having the right resources and solutions in place to achieve full awareness
- Not having real-time communications deployed to coordinate and communicate critical information at the speed-of-type™
- Documenting vital issue and incident details using a pen, paper, or a spreadsheet
- ‘Going with your gut’ to make significant operational decisions because you don’t track data or don’t know how to track it. You need data to measure performance!
You might be thinking this is obvious, then why don’t you have this taken care handled?
If you do have these potential oversights handled, please share this article with someone who you believe will benefit from learning these valuable lessons today.
We believe in reciprocity.
It makes everyone more effective and efficient.
The bottom line is that in order to have peace of mind, you can’t make these same mistakes.
They’ll do more than threaten your operation in the end.
It’ll be crippled.
You’ll never achieve Proactive Operations.
It’s time to limit the mistakes your operation makes, starting from a higher level.
After you shape up your operation, you can share the insights with your peers.
Deal?
Today, we’re going to help you by giving you four all-encompassing ways to overcome mistakes that affect your success.
Stop Oversight from Crippling Your Incident Management
We will use the ACDA Principle™ as our guide.
It’s a simple, yet powerful principle we developed after years of working with industry experts.
The principle is made up of four areas, aspects, or pillars.
- Awareness
- Communication
- Documentation
- Analysis
Having all of these in place will give you the ability to remove major operational mistakes that hinder your success.
Like we said above, we get it.
Mistakes will happen.
It’s a natural course of running an operation.
But, mistakes cannot be consistent when using your incident management system.
Imagine what you can accomplish (and prevent) if you have a robust operational structure in place.
Trust us, having the Principle in place allows you to create an environment conducive to productive behavior.
You have a strong starting point and foundation for building a successful operation, benchmarked by what’s working for already successful operations.
The Principle works as a collective to bring your abilities to a superior level of effectiveness.
It’s not about having a strategy and then using software – it is how everything comes together as one ‘proactive operation.’
Now let’s address each pillar for your operation.
The ACDA Principle™ Can Help Save Your Operation
We want to spark your thought process.
Start asking yourself questions to elicit answers.
Question your operation.
Here’s a great list to get your mind working:
- What currently occurs in your operation at all times?
- Does your staff know what’s occurring all of the time or only half of the time?
- Is your staff able to be proactive?
- Is resource allocation a significant concern for you?
- Are you able to efficiently manage departments or personnel?
- How does your team communicate (i.e., mobile app)?
- How far back can you easily retrieve incident details?
- Is liability defense something your operation struggles with often?
- Can you track accountability?
- Do you know whether your staff is executing the correct protocols to handle?
- What solutions do you use to improve your operation’s performance continuously?
The four mistakes above have a negative impact on your operation.
Solve them with the four components of the ACDA Principle™.
There’s a great opportunity ahead of you.
You only need to implement the Principle and execute.
Rather than forcing you to take the precise definitions of awareness, communication, documentation, analysis back to your team, we want to help you apply each with purpose.
We’ll keep the question trend going.
Let’s look at each pillar as a question you need to answer for your operation.
How Do You Increase Your Awareness?
The first thing to consider is what increased awareness would actually do for you.
In all of its glory, how would it better your operation? Why is not having full awareness of your operation a significant mistake?
For starters, having increased awareness helps you be proactive.
When you’re more aware, you’re able to respond to incidents quicker. You’re able to respond to one more than before.
It even opens up some of your time to take on your other responsibilities.
Wouldn’t that be nice?
So, how do you increase your awareness? How do you ensure your operation is fully aware and proactive?
You put solutions in place that work together with your staff.
Now, you’ll have the ability to ensure nothing slips through the cracks.
This process is how you’ll do it.
You’ve got customers, right? You might even have a ton, which in this case is even better.
You can drastically increase your awareness with all of those eyes – text communication software.
Eliminate the need for your staff to track down a supervisor when things go south.
Let your customers report it directly to your operations team.
Everyone’s on the lookout, and you’re saving valuable time while increasing your awareness.
It’s teamwork.
Your operation + your customers = teamwork.
Let’s say a fight occurs, and customers start texting into your operations center.
What happens next?
You use your system to keep other ‘need-to-know’ staff in the loop.
Take note.
Increased awareness doesn’t end on the frontlines.
For it to work, everyone needs to be in unison because you have to mitigate what happens and move to the next incident quickly.
Having full awareness leads to synergy in your operation.
It does not stop there.
How Do You Enhance Your Communication?
An extension of having full awareness is your ability to communicate.
Every aspect of the Principle works together to form an impeccable operation.
To maximize awareness, you need to optimize communication.
How do you do that?
You take full advantage of your platform’s real-time communications capabilities.
From departmental groups and personnel to automation that includes alerts and notifications, you proactively prepare your operation for what’s coming, before it occurs.
Then, when that next incident comes into dispatch, you trigger a chain of communication to staff with a “click, done!”
Oh, we’re not done, though.
You enhance your real-time communications by using mobile apps. You must arm your staff with these mobile apps for next-level communication.
Think about it this way: Do you want to have a superior operation?
Then, start using mobile apps for incident communication, documentation, and management.
You’re opening up your staff’s time when you implement text communication. Let them use that time for efficiently and effectively managing incidents.
They’re efficient because they’re able to report the issues or incidents in real-time.
They’re useful because you have predetermined protocols and incident types available on the mobile device for accurate reporting.
No more mistakes.
Here’s a bonus:
Training is simplified.
Having a structure and time-tested plan in place makes training new, part-time, and even returning staff a lot easier.
How Do You Improve Documentation?
We want to see you succeed.
If you’re still using pen and paper or a spreadsheet to document vital information – it’s your biggest mistake.
You can’t succeed this way.
You might already know this – we talk about it often – written documentation is almost useless when it comes to reducing risk.
Steven Adelman talks about the importance of accurate and complete documentation here.
You need to have complete, accurate documentation for every incident that occurs on your property.
The details matter.
You should, you need, and you can have them all.
A system can provide that for you.
You’re knocking so many birds out with so few stones – when you use the Principle coupled with a platform.
It’s brilliant, and there are many benefits.
Your days of decrypting illegibly handwritten details are far gone.
Your records are digital, which makes accessing them in the future a breeze.
You can link information from associated issues or incidents to preserve your records.
Case in point, when a slip and fall results in a broken ankle, you can have all the information connected to access at a future date.
Digital also means having pictures, videos, audio, and witness statements.
Abilities like this are crucial for your mobile teams too.
For example, your risk managers can use their tablets to document on-scene data right into your solution.
They can get all the facts while avoiding the dishonesty associated with using pen and paper to document incident reports.
Sneaky customers can no longer pull a fast one on your teams once they see how complete your documentation is.
Your staff no longer has to fill in the blanks from their memory either.
What Does It Take to Have Useful Analytics?
You must have complete and accurate documentation.
Then, you need to have reporting capabilities to organize the data for analysis.
The difference between ‘knowing’ and ‘not knowing’ is the difference between proactive vs. reactive operations.
You need the ability to know what’s occurring in your operation.
Then, you can fix it.
You’re on the right track if you digitally document your issue and incident information.
You’re in an even better situation if you communicate what you know to your staff in real-time.
But, the only way to fix your flaws, improve, and achieve Proactive Operations is to analyze every aspect of your operation – from ‘slip and fall’ to ‘brawl.’
Having the data and scrutinizing it gives you the insight you need to reduce errors and counter threats, which have a long-term crippling effect on your operation when overlooked.
Put reports together and question all areas of your operation:
- What issue or incident types occur most often?
- The method most used to report issues or incidents?
- The typical locations of incident types?
- How often is an incident associated with a customer complaint?
- How many alcohol-related incidents occur?
- Which incidents lead to the most escalations?
- Response times to issues and incidents?
- Persons associated with incidents?
- Most common incident resolutions?
All of these questions can be answered with the right reporting in place.
Improvements to each will collectively enrich your operation.
Understanding your operation, and then proactively executing what you learn can take your processes a long way from your initial oversights.
Do you agree?
Over to You
All four areas of the ACDA Principle™ are proven to help professional operations achieve Proactive Operations. Many use it to ensure they don’t make the same mistakes we’ve mentioned in this article.
We challenge you to eliminate the mistakes that could threaten your incident management. We hope you’ll start improving your operation today so that you too can achieve Proactive Operations this year.
So, are any of these mistakes hindering your operation?
Editor's note: This post was originally published in March 2016 and has been updated for comprehensiveness and freshness.
