Failures are an inevitable part of running a business, organisation, facility, or any other entity. What’s important is knowing how to learn from mistakes and set up the right channels for reporting them.
In any type of organisation, you need to promote employee involvement in resolving and avoiding the repetition of mistakes. However, you cannot do that without understanding the common reasons causing them. Hence in this blog post, we will be talking about nine common reasons for mistakes regardless of industry or department.
9 Reasons For Failure
1. Lack of communications
Enabling employees to complete tasks properly, and with minimal mistakes, requires time and effort. When people do not understand what they are doing, how to do it optimally, or why they are doing something there is a higher chance of making mistakes or failing to complete tasks altogether. Mitigate this risk by ensuring clear communications on tasks, responsibilities and projects (current and upcoming) that require actions from employees.
2. Lack of leadership
Working without sufficient or proactive leadership is just as bad as not knowing what to do due to a lack of communication. The leadership should be present, providing clear directions and empowering information-sharing across the team so that everyone can complete their work. You need to make sure workers have all the information they need to complete their tasks with confidence.
3. Lack of vision
If employees do not have a direction and understanding of the overall vision they are working towards, it will have an impact on the quality of their work and their performance (ie: the number of mistakes they make). The vision and mission goes hand in hand with communication and providing sufficient information, but also includes promoting a culture where everybody feels that they have a purpose behind the work they are doing.
4. Complex systems
Some surroundings and functions will have more chance of failure and mistakes than others. This means a failure could be inherent to a system based on its complexity. There is usually a limited set of improvements to reduce the complexity itself, but as general rule of thumb, all steps in a process should be well-documented in order to increase the likelihood of succeeding.
5. Ill-discipline, lack of trust or negligence
Other times, failures happen as a result of the employee’s negligence or lack of trust. This involves failure to abide by departmental or operational procedures, or disregarding rules and methods. The root causes vary and might be about organisational problems, individual relationships with supervisors or lack of motivation as a whole. Thus, offering a turnkey solution is impossible but being aware of these issues is always the beginning. To do that, having a low-threshold incident reporting platform helps a lot.
6. Not learning from past mistakes
A huge cause of repeated failures and mistakes is that organisations do not address the root causes of failure the first time around. These unaddressed problems are like snowballs starting to roll down from the top of a mountain, getting bigger and bigger as more time passes. To avoid this, push to understand underlying issues, mitigate them, document the corrective actions, and make sure relevant people are being trained based on this new information.
7. Poor reporting channels
Poor incident or issue reporting channels and policies can cause blockages in identifying and resolving issues. To learn from past mistakes, you need to enable the possibility for employees to report and notify you when mistakes happen. To do this, you need to have a proper channel, make sure people know how to find it, and make the reporting itself as effortless as it can be.
8. A lack of business goals overview
If the strategy of your department or business isn't communicated properly, employees won’t know their goals, objectives or how to best execute their everyday work. This makes it more likely that they will face problems and failures. To address this, make sure that everybody understands both the bigger scope and how their role plays into achieving it. As an additional tip, we highly recommend organisations to look into both KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and OKRs (Objectives and Key Results).
9. Lack of employee involvement
The role of management and a manager is key for minimising failures and mistakes. Managers are responsible for defining clear plans and goals, conducting quality checks, organising and monitoring their team's performance, and reducing the organisational fear of failure . A part of the performance success also comes down to how involved and engaged each individual team member is. Employee involvement has a direct impact on the efficiency and bottom-line of the business, as it also includes high levels of productivity. If employees aren't feeling involved in setting the KPIs, OKRs or strategies for their work, then the team motivation drops. This leaves room for more errors, and slow delivery times.
Final Thoughts
Failures are like a two-sided sword. Although it’s important to embrace them at times (as a learning curve), it is also necessary to avoid them where possible. Understanding why or how failures happen gives you valuable insight to help you address the causes instantly.
Are you looking for a tool to report failures, document corrective actions and share best practices across your organisation? Falcony | Observe ticks all the boxes for effortless reporting, investigation management, customisability, real dialogue and a lot more.
We are building the world's first operational involvement platform. Our mission is to make the process of finding, sharing, fixing and learning from issues and observations as easy as thinking about them and as rewarding as being remembered for them.
By doing this, we are making work more meaningful for all parties involved.
More information at falcony.io.
