The future of auditing has arrived. It didn’t come in a slow progression; it came with a rush and a bang due to COVID-19.
Overnight, auditing by third parties stopped due to travel restrictions and health concerns. And at the same time, it became necessary to require employees to remember and perform new and ever-changing health and safety practices several times a day.
That’s a lot to ask of employees, and it’s an incredible influx of data to track and analyze.
It’s understandable that many companies, not just in the hospitality industry, are using laminated and paper checklists to track daily employee compliance; they’re fast and easy to implement in an emergency.
However, this means the manual effort for gathering data, organizing it, and finding meaningful insights went from difficult to nearly impossible. That’s why I believe the key to organizing and managing an influx of data is moving to a mindset of continuous quality via digital transformation.
A Model of Continuous Quality
The idea of continuous quality means getting new data constantly to strive for up-to-the-minute insights across your whole business. That sounds like a massive undertaking, and ultimately it is. But you don’t have to go from zero to sixty overnight.
In fact, you’ve already started moving toward a model of continuous quality by using more checklists, self-audits, and self-assessments (AKA gathering more data) in response to COVID-19. But an increase in manual data gathering and reporting could easily overwhelm your business without digital transformation.
In Digital Transformation We Trust
I wish I could tell you that I have a magical way to make spreadsheets and paper checklists do more work. But the reality is they will forever be manual tools. Additionally, what we thought would be a slow plod into the digital future is now an urgent necessity.