Mistakes cost us money, time and often customers. That is the reason why everyone in a leadership role must investigate and eliminate them.

How many mistakes did you do or any of your team members in the past few days? Here we are not looking at massive mistakes which force your company to close down or have people lose their jobs.

But small mistakes like not replenishing items, not closing doors properly or leaving an item behind. We all make mistakes on a daily basis, not on purpose, but because we are human. 

Sometimes a mistake just costs us a bit of time to rectify, or an apology to the customer, perhaps linked with a little recovery gesture. However, sometimes a mistake can lead to a bigger disaster, a health and safety issue which has a massively costly outcome.  

As leaders and managers, it is our responsibility to eliminate as many mistakes as possible. We train our staff and re-train them, we motivate them and we measure performance. Sometimes we accept mistakes and make ourselves believe that this mistake won’t happen again. Perhaps we take drastic action and dismiss or discipline the individual who has done the mistake.  But we should ask ourselves the question: why do these mistakes happen? Are we doing enough to make them stop?

In many of the recurring functions of our work, mistakes are often the result of not following established policies and procedures. These mistakes create situations that will require resources from us to correct the mistake and we will not be able to charge for it. It is then unbillable labour and supplies that can end up costing our business a lot of money.

We often completely undervalue to impact of mistakes that reflect on the bottom line of our Profit and Loss statement. And by the way, while you are trying to fix the mistakes, you are again using resources such as your time, which would have been better spent by maintaining or growing your business. 

No one will ever be able to run a mistake-free business. But it is certainly worth finding out what causes them and start implementing a systematic way to guard against future mistakes. Do your team members understand the impact of mistakes on the bottom line? Do you review mistakes and look at ways to prevent them in the future?

About the author:

Tatjana Ahmed is the Director of Housekeeping at Grand Hyatt Dubai and Chairwoman of the UAE Housekeepers Association.