It’s the goal of every center owner to run a top quality program and operate in compliance at all times. You want to be the program of choice in your area and you’ve worked hard to achieve that honor.
You’ve practically memorized your licensing requirements, furnished your school beautifully, invested in the best curriculum, and may have even gone the extra mile by becoming accredited.
You’ve put a lot of time and energy into creating standard processes, procedures, systems for operation, and have trained your team well.
You’ve gone through all the right motions, yet how do you truly know if you are meeting your own goals and standards? How can you prove that your team is following your processes and operating in compliance every day? Other than feeling like you’re “doing pretty good,” how can you know if you’ve improved or dropped the ball?
You can’t manage what you don’t measure
If you are like most providers, you’ve created a few checklists that you expect your team to complete daily. You’ve done what you know to do to ensure your team is doing what you expect. Your director might double-check these daily or weekly, but then they are either tossed in the trash or filed away never to be looked at again.
Many providers might not even realize that there is data that can be analyzed from cleaning checklists, classroom compliance checks, injury reporting, and maintenance records that can give you answers and insight into your business that you never knew you needed.
Our own data shows that this is something most providers need to work on. In a 2021 Survey, we asked providers:
We asked that same audience how often they were doing proactive audits and spot checks against their processes and procedures. Although they all reported “wanting to,” only 39% actually do so today. So, as an industry we’ve got room to grow room to improve.
We’ve learned that in most cases, if providers are tracking any compliance or best practices, they are doing so with paper lists and binders. If they’ve graduated to a spreadsheet, that’s great, but requires manual updates after the fact.
Unfortunately, a paper system or spreadsheet can only give you documentation showing that tasks were completed. It is extremely difficult and time-consuming to get data out of hundreds of random pieces of paper, let alone data that you can make decisions from.
You can’t manage what you don’t measure
There is so much information that can be pulled from your checklists when you digitize them in the 1Place Childcare Software. Our digital dashboards will allow you to not only confirm compliance, but identify trends, make decisions or improvements, and spot any gaps that might exist.
As one example, let’s look at the value of setting up your opening and closing classroom checklists in the 1Place App. You’ll be able to see in real-time whether or not your team is currently completing required tasks. If you notice any troublesome issue when monitoring daily completion, you can act quickly to remedy the situation. You’ll also have a record of historical compliance, which could come in handy if there were ever an issue with licensing.
Turning your data into information you can analyze
Whether you are using our checklists, incident reports, or maintenance tickets, keeping the historical data digitally allows you to compare differences between time periods, centers, classrooms, or individual staff members to identify trends.
We all know that injuries happen from time to time, they’re a normal part of children playing. But wouldn’t it be amazing if you could analyze when those injuries happened, the severity of injuries, where they are happening, and whether they are happening more often with a specific child or staff member?
When you begin to get those analytics of what, where, and who you might be able to identify if there is something you could be doing to prevent some of them from happening?
Having this data in front of you will allow you and your center management to confidently take steps to ensure every center and team member is delivering an exceptional, consistent early learning experience.
Can you see how valuable being able to analyze this type of data can be?
You can look for trends and truly know if you are following your own standards, are in compliance with licensing or other accrediting authorities, or have any gaps that you need to address.
Going digital means real-time visibility
When you rely on a paper checklist system to ensure your team is completing required tasks it is very hard to analyze or pull actionable data out of them without spending a substantial amount of time and effort. Even if you were able to get some of your data into do-it-yourself spreadsheets, there wouldn’t be organization-wide, real-time visibility. A paper system just doesn’t sale.
Wouldn’t it be nice…
- If you could make corrections before a complaint to licensing or a citation might occur?
- If you could have an audit trail for licensing (should it ever be needed) to prove a history of compliance, actions, and checks with a digital record?
- If you could make informed decisions and take actions based on the data and trends that you see?
- If you to reduce your carbon footprint and save ink and paper costs?
When you upgrade to a digital, cloud based system …
- Your checklists are in the cloud and staff use tablets, ipads, etc. vs paper to complete.
- Owners and managers have instant visibility to checklist completion status, operational compliance, maintenance issues, and more.
- You can make some decisions in real-time or quickly remind on-site staff of something left undone.
- You can compare where you were and where you are now to truly see gaps and make plans for improvement.
- You can analyze trends over time to see if your staff is regularly in compliance, improving where they were once weak, or might need retraining.
- Calling out and rewarding consistency of staff
The digital dashboards that 1Place provides allow you to truly see what is happening in your business when it comes to measuring and monitoring your:
- Brand standards & best practices
- Operational processes
- Compliance with licensing and accreditation requirements
- Cleanliness practices
- Food safety
- Staff records
- Maintenance checks and task management
- Playground safety
- Common drills preparedness and documentation
- Open & close checklists
- Food safety checklists
- Learning environment audits
- Cleaning schedules
- And more
Is it time to uplevel your compliance and best practice monitoring by going digital?
1Place Childcare can help. 1Place Childcare exists for the purpose of helping programs manage and monitor best practice and compliance.
With 1Place you have the digital environment to get the real-time visibility.
Whether you are operating with a paper based system or if you have begun to digitize it, 1Place Childcare can help you across all of these different areas to get those analytics.
Interested in finding out more?
Let us show you how 1Place Childcare can help you save time and money, provide real-time visibility, and improve efficiencies in your centers.
