Human Resource Planning: Definition, Objectives, And Steps
Human resource planning is an essential part of every successful business. Unfor...
Do you want to ensure your business meets customer needs and complies with state, federal, and local regulatory requirements? Implement a corrective action plan.
At first glance, many managers may think that a corrective action plan is part of employee discipline or employee development. And while you can use a corrective action plan to address those issues, you can also use it to improve other aspects of your business.
In this article, the experts at Sling help you understand exactly what a corrective action plan is and how to implement one in your company.
At its most basic, a corrective action plan (or “CAP” for short) is a step-by-step plan that’s put in place to address specific shortcomings or errors in the operation of your business.
Most often, you’ll implement a corrective action plan in an effort to:
Despite those most-common uses, you can deploy a CAP any time you identify an issue within your business that you want to change.
The corrective action plan could be something as simple as how you greet your customers when they first walk in or something as complicated as how you set up your accounting practices.
Think of a corrective action plan as a record of your actions. The CAP gives you a reference point to look back on when there are questions about implementation and when it comes time to evaluate whether or not the changes were successful.
With a written strategy in place, you and your team can monitor, manage, develop, improve, and evolve your solutions much easier — and more successfully — than if you randomly tried different approaches.
In many ways, a CAP is like the scientific method:
Once you’ve gone through the steps of your plan and analyzed the results, you can then refine the CAP to make further improvements.
Now that you understand what a corrective action plan is and why it’s important, let’s focus on how to implement one for best results.
In this first step, try to get an understanding of the underlying problem.
You may have quality guidelines or standard operating procedures in place, but there could be fundamental obstacles that make those guidelines and standards difficult to achieve.
When you get to the core issue, the solutions often present themselves. This makes it easier to plan, write, and implement your corrective action plan.
Once you thoroughly understand the problem in question, it’s time to plan the process for improvement.
During the planning stage, you should:
When you complete the planning process, it’s time to document your solutions.
Now it’s time to put pen to paper and write out the details of your plan. Be sure to include such specifics as:
Depending on how big your CAP is, this step may be straightforward or extremely involved.
If the CAP focuses on an individual employee, the training may only occupy a few hours. But if the CAP focuses on a larger, business-wide issue, training may take weeks or even months.
When planning your training, lay out the process from start to finish so that your team has the knowledge, understanding, skills, and confidence necessary to comply with the corrective action plan.
Once training is complete, set a date for the plan to go live.
Before that date, ensure that your written plan is complete and that all instructions, procedures, and methods are in place and readily available to all of your employees.
Back in step two (the planning phase), you set a period of time to test the CAP. Regardless of the duration, when that time period has elapsed, it’s time to examine the results.
Did the corrective action plan perform as intended? Was the issue resolved? Could the results be better?
Think of this as a repeat of step one, and try to get as full a sense of the underlying problem as possible.
When you’ve thoroughly examined the results, organize a new process (step two), adjust the CAP (step three), and start again.
One of the most important aspects of implementing a corrective action plan is finding the time to focus on the planning, corrective actions, and analysis of the results. Scheduling software like Sling can help.
The Sling app can help you carve out time during the busy workday to discuss, examine, and refine your CAP so you can achieve the best results the first time through.
But that’s not the only thing Sling can do. The Sling suite of tools also includes:
With Sling, you can conduct all of your workforce management activities in one place instead of cobbling together various separate apps that don’t integrate well with each other.
No matter the size of your business, Sling helps you build your team’s work schedule in minutes rather than hours. That can give you more time to perfect your corrective action plans and improve every aspect of your business.
For more resources to help you manage your business better, organize and schedule your team, and track and calculate labor costs, visit GetSling.com today.
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