The answer is no. None, zero, nada. You can skip the rest of this post if you don’t care about the ‘why’. Chances are you’re not going to actually believe me. You’re going to want to find someone else who’s going to tell you why they should have signatures on them. 

Why checklists shouldn’t have signatures on them

Checklists are not a tool to get your staff in trouble. Yes, you want accountability from a checklist, but the way you get accountability out of it is not by a signature at the end of the week, day, or month. The way you get accountability is by actually managing your restaurant. You need someone walking around and making sure the people are doing the items on the checklist. I know you see this over and over again on my videos: Manage systems. Develop people. 

Manage systems means you build the system, such as a checklist, and give it to your staff members. But, then you still have to manage that it’s getting done. This isn’t ‘build the system, build a checklist’ then hope that your staff does it and if they don’t, we get them in trouble for it.

What good does that do you? Go ahead and fire them, I don’t care. You still got a 1-star review for a hamburger that took 30 minutes because the station wasn’t set up correctly. You can’t hit the rewind button or go backward in time for that. The accountability that I don’t care about is the signature that tells you what they did 6 weeks ago or yesterday. What I care about is your manager (or you) checking up to make sure your staff is doing what they need to do now! 

Remember, checklists are not designed to get people in trouble; they’re simply a tool to help them do their job. If this particular topic is interesting to you, there’s more on our website. You can also look at our previous video about checklists. And don’t forget to join us on next week’s Facebook live where we go into more depth on the topic as well as answer questions live on that call. 

Remember systems = success.