How To Build A Culture Of Quality - A Holistic Approach

Ouchitya Karan || Gurgaon, 17.Feb.2023

Every company strives for quality in its products, services, staff, and reputation, but it’s easier said than done. It can be quite easy to add it as your corporate slogan, publish it on your website, provide witty quotes about it across company break rooms, and even include whole sections about it in employee handbooks. But a true culture of quality must become embedded in the very psyche of every employee and carried across all aspects of the organization.

To accomplish this, companies must take a holistic approach to quality. It must be peer-driven, supported by the highest corporate echelons, graciously rewarded, and comprise all aspects of the company: people, processes, products, and services.

Since a culture of quality has significant financial repercussions also, how can companies reach a state of nirvana when it comes to quality? Following are the tips for deploying a strategic quality management program:

1. Define your core quality values. Often, one of the biggest challenges is in defining what it is you hope to achieve when it comes to quality. Nebulous definitions will never get off the ground, so it’s important to be as specific as possible when defining what quality looks like at your organization. Provide concrete examples of quality metrics and then be sure to track progress.

2. Don’t lead with compliance. Some companies think that by becoming compliant with industry standards, such as ISO, cGMP, and others, they’ve proven their focus on quality, but they’re missing the point. By leading with quality, compliance almost always follows. Compliance is kind of like teaching to just pass the test — it helps companies get over one hurdle but doesn’t equip them for building a sustainable quality culture.

3. Democratize quality management. While many firms have quality assurance and quality control leaders, it’s important to make quality a responsibility enterprise-wide. Employees should be encouraged to share their input and ideas on how quality can be improved without incrimination. Further, quality champions should be allowed to put their ideas into action and rewarded for successful outcomes.

4. Automate the process. While it’s clear that quality processes affect all aspects of a company, it can be a time-consuming process with many moving parts. Using an automated quality management system (QMS) that centralizes data across functions is an effective way to ensure quality processes are followed, documentation is up to date and dashboards are alerting you to any quality issues that can be thwarted before they get out of control. By allowing the system to manage the quality processes, managers are freed up to focus on innovation and the core business instead of putting out fires.

5. Let data drive the bus. While developing a true quality culture can sound like a soft skill, there’s much more science involved than you think. Quality must be informed and led by data that highlights problem areas, anticipates trends, and helps you track progress.

6. Constantly take the pulse. Whether the quality initiative is a new process on the manufacturing line, product quality improvements, or new self-audit standards, it’s important to initially define what success will look like, using specific measurements and benchmarks then gather feedback from customers, employees, or partners to assess your outcome.

7. Strive for continuous improvement. Once you’ve implemented the programs and gathered stakeholder feedback, it’s important to not let it end there. True quality programs can never be static but must constantly evolve to meet changing needs and requirements. By constantly raising your own bar, you can ensure that quality is truly part of the culture and not a one-off project to address a specific problem.