Efforts to foster a quality culture so often fail because the critical aspect of engaging people’s hearts and minds is misunderstood. The copious compliance documents and ISO protocols required for QA are written in such a complex manner that it is hard for people to understand.
It is only when you take a step back and engage individuals through their own experiences and understanding of quality that they are more likely to comprehend and embrace it. Ultimately, the quality of your business depends on you and your personal commitment to quality.
Engaging hearts and minds across the business
When it comes to making quality more personal, engaging the hearts and minds of your people couldn’t be more important.
When you consume a Cadbury’s chocolate bar, you know that you are buying a recognised brand that is well produced and tastes good. But that didn’t happen by chance. The quality of Cadbury’s products is driven by the teams of people behind the scenes who are consistently delivering what they say they will deliver.
The point is that if you embed a sense of individual responsibility and ownership for quality into your company culture, you help your people to understand the importance of their work and link it with the overall success of the business.
So what does it take to achieve high quality impact
Quality can be easy to identify with a well-known brand. A company may be recognised as a great place to work, for its excellent customer service or its prestigious product range. But so often, lack of cohesion leads to inconsistent or reduced product quality and low levels of customer satisfaction. Even with a sophisticated quality management system, you may still experience poor quality outputs if you have not focused on the missing key ingredient to improving quality, your people.
This plays out in our personal lives too. For example, when you decide on a night in with a takeaway and a movie. However, when the takeaway arrives, it’s the wrong one or they’ve forgotten one of the dishes, or maybe the internet goes down and you can’t download the movie you want. The result is a ruined evening, full of disappointment and frustration. You’ve experienced poor quality.
Quality needs to run through the whole organisation, engaging individuals, teams and different sites. Staff need to be trained, mentored and coached and given on-going support after the programme. To get it right the first time, you need your senior leaders to recognise the importance of quality.
To make quality personal, you need your people to:
- Take pride and do checks on their own work before it’s handed over to their internal customer. We describe this as thinking like a parachute packer.
- To understand who their internal and external customers are and their levels of expectation, effectively defining what good looks like.
- To recognise the concept of personal guarantee; that when they complete a task and hand it over, they are effectively signing off their work with a personal guarantee that it is good enough.
“A firm can have all the SOPs, systems and controls required but, without quality culture, product quality and business continuity cannot be assured. Quality culture is about decision-making and behaviours at all levels of the organisation every day. It is an environment in which each and every person understands and embraces their responsibility for protecting product quality and patient safety”
Vice President, leading global pharmaceutical firm
By making quality personal, what outcomes can you expect?
Outcomes can be significant when done right. Some of our leading pharmaceutical customers have already achieved impactful results by reducing batch and documentation errors for example. This has led to a substantial decrease in field actions, and subsequently millions in savings. The resulting knock-on effects are enormous.
One of the key outcomes that our customers come to us about is how to drive customer confidence and trust in their organisations. Many employees don’t think about having an ‘internal customer’, but anyone you are delivering a service to can be considered your customer. If an operator is working late on a Saturday night on a batch manufacturing process, they need accurate documents to work off so they have absolute confidence the information is the latest, correct data.
A Making Quality Personal programme reaches every employee. Whether it’s a question of how your staff deal with phone or email queries, how quickly your suppliers are paid or how efficiently your technicians solve customer issues, your overall levels of quality will affect how your customers see you.
So what can we learn
Whether you’re making a cup of tea for your friend or following complex pharmaceutical production processes at work, the level of quality required by your ‘customer’ needs to be understood by the person delivering the service. Your friend may or may not want sugar or milk, they might like the tea weak or strong, the point is that you need to deliver on their expectations if you don’t want to disappoint them.
Making Quality Personal empowers everyone, regardless of role. It’s about how you connect better with customers and colleagues to achieve the goal of right first time with the customer in mind.
Over the years, we have seen organisations who have signed up for a quality programme but not adopted company-wide measures to make it a success. They have not engaged at senior level from the outset, thereby ringing the death knoll for its success. There are also examples of buy-in at senior level, but training is directed at identified ‘problem’ areas within the business, such as a team of operators not working optimally. Without working with the team leader and the wider department on what good looks like, the problem area will not be solved in silo.
Driving a quality culture for future success
Your business may have all the quality systems and document controls required to run the organisation, but without a quality culture your products and customers may not be optimised. A quality culture, where everyone takes ownership for protecting product quality and patient safety, involves changing behaviours at all levels of the organisation each and every day. Committing to ongoing support and the mentoring of your employees is vital to keep Making Quality Personal part of the lifeblood of the organisation. Only then will you win the hearts and minds and drive future success.
