Quality is different for everyone, regardless of their industry and product type. It is about meeting compliance requirements for some people, while some consider it an opportunity to bring a difference. The ultimate objective remains the same, i.e., customer satisfaction and retention.
After all, the customer is king.
We all understand that ensuring quality products and services requires building a culture of quality wherein every team member genuinely cares about quality and contributes to informed decision-making for achieving quality objectives.
How to Determine a Culture of Quality?
A Culture of Quality clearly reflects through the people and processes in the organization.
When the team members actually care about the quality of work they are doing every day and make informed decisions to achieve the highest quality standards.
What really differentiates a quality culture is achieving quality standards to meet customer expectations, not just for the sake of achieving regulatory compliance.
Some companies often put the printed versions of their quality policy on the office walls. But is it really a practical way to imbibe a culture of quality? Do their employees care about quality? Can they relate to the quality policy? Are their processes well-aligned to meet quality objectives specified in the policy? There is a vast difference. And it reflects in the outcomes.
In the end, the objective is to deliver a product that is helpful for the users and creates a difference in their lives. If your team keeps that in mind and delivers quality, safe, and reliable products to the customers, your organization might have a culture of quality already.
If not, it does not imply that your team does not care about culture. It is a matter of streamlining the processes such that a culture of quality becomes natural, and you can continuously discover improvement opportunities. Eventually, it will improve your brand value, ensuring that you deliver the best quality always.
How to Build a Culture of Quality?
To build a culture of quality, you will need seven critical elements in place, namely:
1. Define Quality Objectives and Values Clearly
Whether you want to refine the existing quality culture or wish to create one, make sure you define the quality objectives and company values clearly. You must think about the values whether they reflect your brand? Do they help achieve quality? Can these be improved with time and growing customer needs?
Also, take a systematic approach to define processes, aligning them with the culture of quality you want. It would be best if you also encourage employee involvement because they will actually use those processes. Such an approach will improve your businesses’ aspects – right from supply chain to marketing strategies.
But be sure to keep your focus on customers when you define the values and quality objectives. Some companies may already have best practices in place and have a quality culture in place. Those companies can consider the root cause analysis to identify inconsistencies in the existing culture to keep improving.
2. Provide Appropriate and Timely Training to Employees
Training is a valuable investment that pays off in the long run for a business. It plays a crucial role in building adept teams, such as activities that reinforce a company’s quality culture. Unfortunately, corporate training is ineffective many times. Research shows that 90% of what we all learn in any given month is forgotten! The cost of external training makes this statistic especially worrisome.
This might be due to trainee mindsets, which is not a criticism.
They must understand how it will enhance their personal growth and add value. Although training is sometimes required to comply with regulatory requirements or results from an audit or inspection, it should not be seen as a checkbox activity. Training lets teams gain new skills they can use to improve their products and processes.
One major problem with training is that there is not always a straightforward way to measure its effectiveness. After all, a person may receive a certificate, but the certification means nothing if that person does not retain the information. However, you can implement an integrated Training Management Software that will help you track the training your employees have already received. You can further review their performance and productivity for the tasks they have been trained on. It will demonstrate the effectiveness of the training programs initiated.
3. Achieve Quality First Then Compliance
While compliance can seem to be a daunting process to businesses, quality and compliance go together. Getting into compliance does not mean your product is of high quality. There are companies that, on paper, comply with all the regulations, but their products and services lack quality.
It is common to see that such companies consider a culture of quality as a responsibility of the quality department, which should be everyone’s responsibility. Giving ownership of quality to a person or group can lead to unnecessary hassles and process halts because they assume that they have the authority to inspect things and request rework at any time. On the contrary, it is essential to streamline processes to create a quality culture.
It is not the proper way to view Quality staff members, and it is certainly a mindset that needs correction within your organization if it appears to exist. Quality should be a priority in every aspect of your organization and every interaction between departments.
Developing and producing quality products is something that every member of your team is doing that matters, and you need to make sure that they fully understand their roles for them to feel positive about their work. The result of embracing quality in all aspects of a business is a better product and fewer headwinds.
4. Have Proper Document Controls for Everything
The goal of document control is to ensure that records and other data are held accountable by the organization. A company’s success depends on its document control procedures. In this way, quality can be scaled and made repeatable. You do this to demonstrate that your documentation complies with all regulations.
Organizations establish document controls as early as possible to facilitate the quality culture. Early document control can often find errors and faults to be corrected before they become a significant problem. And it offers greater traceability too.
Implementing a quality management system (QMS) can significantly simplify document control. As a result, we built Qualityze Cloud-Based Document Management Software to address and solve problems in processes like document control, where it’s effortless for documents to get lost in paper-based systems or applications. You can track each document’s approval status with full traceability across the most recent versions for easy implementation and management.
5. Improve Communication and Collaboration Among Teams
Improper communication and collaboration are yet another common reason that companies fail to develop a quality culture. You must provide your team with a platform to collaborate and communicate for essential tasks such as reviews, approvals, and critical decision-making. It will reduce the process cycle time and improve overall organizational productivity.
To make things centrally accessible, you can rely on a cloud-based quality management solution. It will provide your teams with the required flexibility, reliability, and security to manage the business-critical functions from anywhere across the world.
It is something we offer with Qualityze EQMS to make quality management simplified for organizations. It gives your team more control and confidence in managing everyday processes without any hassles.
6.Take User Complaints & Feedback as Improvement Opportunities
Another best way to ensure a quality culture within your organization is to seek user feedback. It can come in the form of customer complaints. You must analyze complaints to identify the opportunities to improve.
When you respond to the complaints promptly, it will also demonstrate your brand commitment to customer satisfaction and continuous improvements. Incorporating this best practice will also help meeting compliance requirements. As we have already discussed above, if you will chase quality, you need not make additional efforts to achieve compliance.
You can implement a standardized Complaints Management Software solution like Qualityze to transform your customer complaints into opportunities to improve and grow. It automatically documents every detail of the complaint, making it easier to track at the time of audits and inspections.
7. Make Use of Right Quality Management Software
Developing a culture of quality also depends on the system you implement to manage quality. It is like having your groundwork done right. You must have a quality management solution that can help create a closed-loop quality system, bringing all your quality processes together for a complete solution to quality management challenges.
Also, it would be best to have a Quality Management Software that can be easily scaled with your growing business needs and changing compliance requirements. The solution’s scalability makes a world of difference as you cannot change the QMS every time.
We have built Qualityze EQMS Suite, keeping in mind the growing business needs. It facilitates flexibility, scalability, traceability, and security to manage quality data and processes from any location at any time.
Conclusion
Building a culture of quality is not always easy, but it’s the only way to make a product that has universal appeal. In addition, committing to quality brings you numerous benefits, including the increased market share and customer trust.
Implementing best practices to foster a culture of quality reflects your organization’s potential to grow exponentially with time and changing trends.
Hopefully, this comprehensive guide will help you create the right culture wherein your team members strive for the best quality outcomes, even if it means changing existing processes.
Do not worry about any hassles! Because Qualityze Enterprise Quality Management Solution simplifies the journey of change for you and your team members to maintain the “Culture of Quality” while aligning all the critical processes with quality objectives, compliance requirements, and customer needs.
To get more details about Qualityze Quality Management Software and schedule a free demo, please contact our customer success team today on 1-877-207-8616 or write to us at info@qualityze.com, and we will be right there for you.
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