Monday 10 February 2014

Quality Management: a powerful transformational philosophy to success



Today, leaders are under pressure to create “super-enterprises” with the ability to react intuitively and where creativity, learning and collaboration are the cornerstones for enhancing the staying power of growth organizations. If today’s leaders are required to be strong, inspiring, and effective then the dilemma, corporations are faced with is, how are tomorrow’s leaders groomed? Focusing on quality seems to gain ground in the significance list in the answer to that question.

The implementation of a quality management system can bring beneficial results to a company; superior financial and non-financial performance, improved competitiveness and effectively realizing business strategies. When properly deployed, a company has productive and relatively happy employees, increased efficiency, on-time deliveries and all sorts of other desirable outcomes.

Quality should be adopted as a mind-set and not as a complex and difficult to understand methodology with many rules. This is why creating and adopting a culture based on quality within the company is the starting point. The target should be the abortion of old way of thinking and focusing on building up new habits based on quality management principles and practices. In a quality based working environment, every organization must address the following 3Ps: purpose, processes and people.

  • Purpose: People just do the things that are “given” or they act in a similar way with other employees. They do not realize the reason for doing so or if there is an alternative to what they are doing. So the answer to the question “why is this getting done in this way”, the most probable answer will be “because this is the way we do things around here”. It is essential to match individual values with organizational culture because a culture of “shared meaning or purpose” results in actions that help the organization achieve collective goals. An organization will operate more productively as a whole when key values are shared among the majority of its members and visions and goals are clearly defined and communicated.
  • Processes are a set of procedures which are followed within a company and ensure that the deliverables fit with the purpose. Once the purpose is defined the processes are undertaken in order to measure and report the quality of the outcome. Processes need to be clearly specified, even better documented, and continuously monitored and improved.
  • People:  The development and deployment of a human resource plan within the organization aims in meeting its goals and achieving excellence through people. Business owners should, by all means, foster and support an environment that encourages and enables people to reach their full potential so as to ensure that their employees are productive and eager to do the best job possible--this is especially true during today's challenging economic times. Yet every industry and every organization has people who simply do not produce work in the quality that they are capable of providing. When it comes to evaluating potential contributors keep in mind these two important things; selecting for attitude and training for skills.
Quality measurement and control is of particular importance to be considered by all managers and ways for the quality to be measured is through customer, employee or evaluation surveys and end-use customers´ complaints so as to ensure the fulfillment of given requirements. At this point, the presence of management control systems (MCS) needs to be stressed out along with their ability to produce the data required for the analysis.  

Athanasia Athanasopoulou  
M.Sc. Total Quality Management
Operations Project Manager/Analyst
Webropol Sweden

3 comments:

  1. Thank you for sharing this positive blog "An organization will operate more productively as a whole when key values are shared among the majority of its members and visions and goals are clearly defined and communicated."-I wrote my final school project on a topic "the prospect of knowledge creation", and did elaborate this point. However, the individual employees and all should be encouraged and motivated to be willing to share his/her knowledge, be part of key values and aspirations of the organization or company. A more friendly and team spirit environment is a key to ensure productivity. A Flexible but a focused work principles and environment bring about a fulfilling work team. A work team that supports each other ensures all key factors mentioned are in full force, they work without any fuse.

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  2. Thank you for your comment, Frank! I totally agree with you, an organizational culture focused on openness and development and and a supportive team environment fosters a productive work atmosphere.

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