Back to Basics

Four simple steps to get everyone in your organization focused on quality

We often lose sight of quality basics. In any organization, achieving quality excellence is hard and complicated work, but everyone should remember the basics.

ISO 9001 defines quality as the “degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfills requirements.” The definition seems to beg the question, “Whose requirements?”

We can simplify the language and answer this with a short working definition. Quality is “the degree to which the characteristics of our product meet customer and our own internal requirements.” Notice that quality here is a variable; it can be good, mediocre or anything in between. In any case, it can be measured.

However, a quality management system is about more than just measuring how well we meet customer and internal requirements. It’s also about improvement. Achieving conformity to requirements and improving operations involves hard work and often requires highly sophisticated analysis. Everyone within an organization should have a basic understanding of quality and his or her role in achieving it. When we strip away all the explanatory “baggage,” quality comes down to these two simple concepts: satisfying customers and improving performance.

To understand customer satisfaction, we must recognize that there’s almost always a difference between our internal measures of quality and our customers’ perceptions of it. An organization might provide a great product or service, but the customer might not perceive it that way. Everyone must understand the importance of looking at the product or service from the customer’s point of view.

We can be fairly certain our competitors are trying to improve their service delivery, designs, costs, efficiency and so forth. If we don’t do the same, sooner or later we’ll begin to fail in our efforts to satisfy customers. No matter how hard we think we’re working, if customers aren’t satisfied, something is wrong somewhere in the organization. Thus, everyone has a role in improving performance.

Each person should be provided with the knowledge and ability to satisfy customers and improve performance. Here are a few simple guidelines any organi-zation can use to make certain this happens:

Each employee must know what he or she is expected to do. In the real world, this comes down to having instructions that define job expectations. These instructions can be communicated as written procedures, provided in training sessions or even described in photographs.

Each employee must have the means to do the work. Employees need proper tools to do their jobs and training to do them properly. It’s counterproductive if work is clearly defined but the tools to do the work aren’t available.

Each employee must know if work is being done properly. Employees must be able to measure the acceptability of their work. They should ask, “Does my work conform to requirements?” or, “Do I know that customers will be satisfied with my work?” All work should be measurable. When people know they have met requirements, the organization can be confident that the customer will receive a satisfactory product or service. The chain of activities from customer request to product or service delivery will have integrity.

Each employee must know where he or she can get help when things don’t go as planned. Management should encourage employees to seek assistance and to sound an alarm when problems occur. Knowing that each employee is empowered to seek help contributes to the organization’s confidence in the quality of its products and services.

To summarize, each individual must:

Know what to do

Have the means to do it

Know that requirements have been met

Know where to get help

Following these guidelines will help each of us contribute to our customers’ satisfaction and our organizations’ success. A better understanding by every employee of quality’s importance is vital in today’s competitive business climate. It should also help when the registrar’s auditors arrive to do their interviews!

Note: This article is based on material contained in Quality Basics, a new video by John E. (Jack) West and Charles A. Cianfrani produced by the International Forum for Management System Inc. (INFORM). It’s available there or through Paton Press.

About the author
John E. (Jack) West is a consultant, business advisor and author with more than 30 years of experience in a wide variety of industries. He is chair of the U.S. TAG to ISO TC 176 and lead delegate for the United States to the International Organization for Standardization committee responsible for the ISO 9000 family of quality management standards.