Here is the story of two companies from the same industry. Let’s call them Company A and Company B. Both have a similar history, started in business at around the same time, are among the big players in the industry, and operate in the same markets. They even have approximately the same number of employees.
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With all these similarities, however, they have one big difference—their quality departments. Company A has a small quality department of less than 25 people (in a company of about 18,000 employees). By comparison, Company B’s quality department is an army with more than 100 people.
Interestingly, both companies started their quality journey around the same time, about ten years ago. Their results from quality, however, couldn’t be more dissimilar.
In these ten years, at Company A (with the small quality department), the principles of continuous improvement and performance excellence have been the biggest and most consistent contributors to the company’s revenues, profits, and customer satisfaction. The company is also a regular winner of awards for its quality program and the results that it has generated.
Company B, on the other hand, has achieved very little in these ten years, except that a large number of employees have been sent for various training programs. Yet there is no evidence that any of this training content is being applied to improve the quality of the business or the experience of its customers.
Why is this? At Company B, the quality department resembles the story of the frog in the well. Admittedly, it is a large well, and there are 100 frogs, but they seem to have had very little interaction with and effect on the rest of the organization. These people have been busy all these years working within the quality department and with each other, but how can a company deliver quality when only 100 people out of 20,000 think quality?
Company A’s quality department, in contrast, resembles a stream more than a well. Not only has it been smaller, with about 25 people, but it has not been the same 25 people all the time. This company has always believed that, to spread the quality culture across the organization, the quality department must be like a “pipe” through which more and more employees pass. Out of the 25 people in the quality department, only four or five are quality specialists, while the remaining people are—as part of a deliberate and well-planned process—moved into full-time quality roles for some time (typically about three years), and then moved back into a functional role.
This practice at Company A started as an experiment years ago. Looking back now, the story of Company A provides a few interesting facts which could contain lessons for other organizations as well:
1. Although Company A’s quality department consists of about 25 people at any given time, in the last ten years, nearly 100 people have been in a full-time quality role at one time or the other. This number will keep increasing slowly but steadily, given the company’s policy of putting employees through the quality pipeline.
2. The number of employees who have undergone the “quality experience” is much higher. So far, the company has about 2,500 employees who have participated in at least one quality-improvement project connected with the employee’s own functional area. This number will grow at a faster rate than the number of full-time quality employees. This is because the company has a planned policy of involving more and more employees in quality projects. An employee doesn't have to move out of his or her current job or department to participate in a quality project. Instead, the employee participates in projects related to his or her own functional area—for example, an operations employee will participate in a project aimed at improving operational excellence. The company’s experience is that most employees—once they experience the “quality way” of doing their own job—become a different kind of person. They tend to think more in terms of data, analysis, root causes, and customer perspectives—in short, they bring quality-centric thinking to the same job that they had been doing before. I have observed that once acquired, this quality-centric way of thinking stays with people, regardless of whether they are working on a formal quality project or not. It becomes part of their nature, and as quality-centric thinking becomes part of the nature of more and more people, it becomes the nature of the organization!
At Company B, the quality project teams consist of only the quality department employees. Is anyone surprised, then, that they have succeeded neither in improving quality nor in spreading the quality culture? How can you improve the quality of anything—whether it is operations, customer care, sales, or HR—without involving the people responsible for those functions?
3. Although at Company A we saw that the quality experience made most people better and more effective at their own jobs, we observed that the reverse is also true. Some of the best performers in full-time quality roles came from different functional roles, though most of them required some initial training in quality tools and techniques. So it cuts both ways—people with functional or business experience can do well in quality, and people who go through the quality pipeline learn to bring quality-centric thinking into their own job—whatever that job may be.
4. All of this does not diminish the importance of quality specialists and full-time quality employees. We saw that Company A has five quality specialists, 25 full-time quality employees at any given time, and so far about 2,500 employees who have gone through the quality pipeline. Very little of the business improvements that Company A has achieved (and the results have been both significant and sustained year after year) would have been possible without their quality specialists and the full-time quality employees. These people are the catalysts who make the results and the culture change happen.
As in certain chemical reactions, the desired result can be achieved (or achieved fast enough) only if you use the right amount of catalyst in the reaction. Absence of the catalyst can mean no results or painfully slow and insignificant results. On the other hand, too much catalyst (as in Company B) can also hinder your reaction.
My recently published book Continuous Permanent Improvement has a chapter that lists the qualities that quality professionals must possess to play this catalyst role effectively.
So go ahead, get yourself a lean and mean quality department, and use them to infect the rest of your organization with the quality bug. You could become the next Company A!
Comments
The smaller the better
We hear this song since millennia, the legend of David winning Goliath might not be a legend only. Huge companies or organizations are notorious for their ineffectivenesses, we read and hear of them every day. But we keep not listening to these messages and keep therefore building costly and ineffective pyramids. I'm no financial expert yet I want to mention a recent example, the FCA joint venture: both companies were and are not well off on their markets, they are now merging in a big adventure, hoping to make big profits. One, competition is always there to fight; two, such a large organization will have to pay much money to support administrative costs. Will it be worth the effort? Let's Future speak for us.
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