Establishing Forums to Build a Quality Oriented Culture

Total Quality Management (TQM) says that quality is everybody’s job. Each individual’s approach to work, understanding of quality and personal standards of excellence are crucial for delivering quality. One of the biggest challenges for a lot of organizations today is to involve each and every team member in the quality game.

Most people in the organization can do a better job if they know:

• What are the key values and beliefs on quality/excellence in the organization?
• What key actions will help me to align myself to those values and belief system?
• How will those actions add value to organization? How will it benefit me?

Constant communication (from top to bottom and vice versa) is the only way to answer these critical questions and  keep people engaged in excellence. Here are a few forums you can establish/use to promote quality consciousness across the organization:

• Promote quality initiatives in all your monthly/weekly team meetings. Let people at all levels know that excellence in work is not optional. Use these meetings to give them a broad overview of strategies and purpose.
• Establish quality circles or improvement/quality focus groups and rotate people to give everyone a chance to participate.
• Deliver induction trainings to all new joinees and constantly train them thereafter. Train your middle managers on quality to build a right leadership ecosystem.
• Organize events like group discussions and brainstorming sessions to promote ideas, share success stories, best practices and project case studies.
• Spread awareness of your quality beliefs and systems by designing e-bulletins or newsletters. Record video messages on quality and upload them on your corporate intranet.
• Encourage discussions/participation by using internal blogs/wiki/forums.
• Set up a reward and recognition system to promote right behaviors with respect to quality of products/services delivered to customers.

Quality improvement involves transformation, and these forums helps in transforming culture for excellence in all spheres of an organization’s activities. Moreover, they are excellent tools to answer the questions most people have.

TQM is not just a philosophy. It is a vehicle to drive excellence across the organization. Probably that is the reason why it is called “total” quality management.

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Note: My book ‘#QUALITYtweet – 140 bite-sized ideas to deliver quality in every project’ explores the people, process and leadership aspects to build a constantly improving organization culture. Check it out if you haven’t already!