Are you an organisation who accepts quality as an essential part of doing business or do you cross your fingers and get on with the important things?
I hear leaders say that they have a quality person who is responsible for quality and I talk to a lot of quality managers struggling to get the leadership team to see the importance of the work they do.
Whilst other organisations might be happy to get the tick and flick of approval from a third-party certification body, how do you make sure that quality is integrated into everything you do all of the time?
How do you make sure that everyone in your organisation is doing the right think all of the time, even when no-one is looking?
I once worked in an organisation who contracted an expert to come in and “get us through certification”. He diligently wrote our procedures and charged us over $50,000. On the day of audit it was clear that even though we had a shiny procedure manual (colour coded pages, flowcharts…. it was very pretty) no-one could answer any questions about it because it just wasn’t understood or seen as important, it was something the quality manager handled. We had a very expensive adornment sitting on the shelves gathering dust.
When I work as an external auditor it is very easy to see when a quality system is truly integrated. I always try to talk to a member of the leadership team and it is clear when they have outsourced their quality system to the quality manager or a consultant.
My message is simple, integrate integrate integrate. ISO 9001:2015 puts a bigger emphasis on leadership and this important shift in the language means it is harder to outsource quality. Its no loner about managing the quality system its about leading in quality.
There are three things you should be doing if you want to integrate quality:
1. Start really caring about quality and supporting the leadership team to fully integrate quality in their teams.
2. Support your quality manager to get buy in and develop strong integrated systems and,
3. Support staff to stop resisting quality initiatives and accept the constant change of continual improvement.
Stop complying and start championing.
As Yoda says….. do or do not…there is no try
This is even more important today when we see that yet another disability service provider is being investigated following allegations of abuse.
Here's a copy of my white paper Visible Values where I talk about the importance of aligning values with behaviours.