The quality of the work your organization produces heavily impacts the well-being of your employees which ultimately impacts the quality of product, service, the brand your customers receive. There are a number of industry quality standards, which if adhered to, deliver a good level of quality; these are discussed in our Measuring Quality article.
How do you improve quality?
Deming came up with 14 steps for a management team to improve organizational quality, they are:
- Ensure that everyone’s working towards improving quality
- Embrace change and want to improve quality
- Build quality from day 1; it’s no good thinking ‘we will just improve it later’
- Build using the best quality parts you can; poor quality and costs will come back to bite
- Strive to be better, always look to improve
- Make training part of the day-to-day work routine; we should always be looking to progress
- Have leaders at all levels in your organization to drive quality forward and embrace the change
- Don’t play the ‘blame game’, allow employees to try new things without the fear of failure
- Remove all barriers which could get in the way of improving quality
- Remove conflicting targets which means that if 1 department succeeds the other may fail
- Remove aggressive quotas which can’t be maintained
- Promote ‘pride in your work’; proud employees will produce higher quality work
- Encourage self-improvement; this will ultimately lead to improved work quality
- Give employees responsibility, this empowers them and makes them proud of what they do
As you have probably concluded yourself, the people element of the extended marketing mix is central to achieving these steps; so get the right people on board to improve the well-being of your employees that will ultimately improve your organization.