- Look at adaptation rather than completely new systems. Trying to learn something that is new to everyone is not always the best way to forge ahead. Instead, looking at ways to adapt your current, familiar systems will be a lot easier all round. A good quality system will allow you to integrate a range of processes without causing disruption to your current processes.
- Ensure that you have a good framework. In order to make changes that will be lasting and beneficial, you need a good framework or ‘mindset’ in place. This means using your current business goals to drive improvements, and creating a system that your people already understand and work with on a daily basis. Goals should be clearly defined, while the system should promote problem solving, ideas, communication and tracking to allow for company-wide growth.
- Remember to give credit. Quality is more of a journey than a destination. Along the way, many people have helped to bring your goals into reality. As such, it’s important to give credit to those who have contributed as you acknowledge past achievements. Positive feedback where credit is due is vital, but proactive feedback where projects were less successful is also important to show how things could be done more effectively.
- Encourage ideas. Ideas can come from anywhere, anyone and anyplace. No ideas should be ignored – whether they are from customers or employees. Communicate goals for your quality management targets, and create an open-door policy or some sort of feedback system that makes it easy for feedback to be given.
- Consider starting small. Starting small will always allow you to grow, while going flat out right from the get go puts you in a tight spot should things not go to plan. Select the projects that are most important, and start from there.
- Involve your people. Quality is all about people. Involvement encourages participation, fosters commitment and empowers people to work harder at achieving your goals. Rather than making rules and giving orders, try to facilitate support and active participation from team members across the organisation. This will go a long way in ensuring that goals are met, while also allowing employees to feel part of the company.
- Keep communication open. It is not much good to your quality strategies if you are not bothering to keep anyone informed on progress. All projects need feedback and communication to work. Meeting targets and sharing the success through communication helps to drive further success, after all.
- Track and monitor at all times. Whatever you measure, you can manage. Ideas, participation, results and all other KPIs can all be tracked, so show you the correlation between the efforts you are making and the actual benefits your efforts are providing.
- Get support from top management. That lovely expression ‘walking the talk’ is one that is worth noting. Investing time is essential to the success of any quality project. Who better to show just how much time can help than top level management? There are few more effective ways to motivate and inspire from top down than to show the top leaders getting involved in quality projects.
- Don’t forget to have fun. Yes, it really is possible for improvement strategies to be fun. With all of the technology and automated tools to be found these days, the hassles of manual document management and frustrating loads of paperwork driven audits are gone forever. With the right tools, the right attitude and the right inspiration, employees can get on board in a way that is rewarding rather than boring.
Keep these tips in mind when you are ready to get your quality management projects off the ground, and you may just find that things set off at the right pace a lot more easily than you’d guess. photo credit: i’ll give YOU a tip… via photopin (license)
Contact us for more information
