How Small Businesses Can Level Up Their Quality Culture: Simple Steps to Making it Happen
A small business’ quality culture can be thought of twofold: “quality of work” and “quality of support.” In our experience, the phrase “quality of support” encompasses the phrase “quality of leadership”, which is often considered synonymous to the phrase “quality of work.” In general, the best leadership creates a culture of collaboration which then fosters quality work. The best leaders also inspire employees’ drive to improve their ability to provide quality support.
Organizational leaders are often uncertain how to begin. While there are many frameworks, tools, and best practices for this initiative, the most crucial question remains: Where do you start? To help you get started on your journey towards building a quality culture, this article provides an overview of some key steps and considerations that will get you on the right track.
There are several questions people ask, such as:
1. What is quality culture?
2. What are the benefits of quality culture?
3. How can you start developing a quality culture in your organization?
4. How can you maintain and reinforce a strong quality culture in your organization?
“Quality culture” is often used as a catch all phrase. Quality culture is not a buzzword. It simply means your organization must provide employees, who interact every day with both customers and each other, with the tools and education in order to continually improve and bring more quality work to your organization. It also means employees must work together to deliver quality products and exceptional customer service. Quality culture is something we strive for at our workplace, it’s something we believe we are all passionate about. It’s also something that we’re constantly working to improve.
A quality culture doesn’t just happen overnight, but with these steps you can make it happen sooner rather than later.
In a small business, quality culture is implemented through the cooperation of everyone in the company. It is the way small businesses solve problems and achieve goals. It is one of the key elements that differentiates small businesses from big ones. However, creating a quality culture requires time, patience, and commitment on the part of employees. In this article we will discuss how small businesses can effectively implement a quality culture in their company.
Here are some ideas on getting quality culture in your business:
1. Understanding – What Quality Culture Is
Quality culture is one of many ways you can improve business processes at your organization. The process becomes as important as the quality for success in your business. Quality culture is also about the environment you put your people in. In today’s world of accountability and control where people are held as responsible for making business decisions and the success of their company, quality culture offers a more balanced approach between the right people and the right processes.
Quality culture provides a more successful approach towards how your company does business instead of what your business does.
The quality culture of your workplace provides the foundation for attracting and retaining a broad range of valuable team members, and for achieving continuous financial growth, superior work performance, and improved long-term retention rates for all. In the quest to transform the way your team works, here are simple steps to help you level up your quality culture
2. Make Quality a Priority, Not an Afterthought
The concept of quality is very complex. Your company spends a substantial amount of time and energy trying to build quality without truly knowing what quality is or how to build it into its fabric. Your business culture may include a handful of dedicated individuals who are responsible for maintaining the quality of the products you sell. However, they may not be the top individuals responsible for creating overall quality perceptions or for ensuring that your employees are performing at their peak at all times. In fact, a key component of your culture may be a more nebulous quality leadership team made up of all kinds of individuals, including project managers, product managers, customer-service representatives, and key-personnel assistants. Leadership team and their perception about quality and quality culture has to be right.
3. Make Quality an Inevitable Element of Everything Your Organization Does
Everyone wants to go the extra mile to make their products look appealing while simultaneously guaranteeing they are made with high quality materials. Many businesses have to work at becoming Quality Driven organizations, they have to work at ensuring that they are constantly improving and evolving in order to be successful and to stay relevant. We have to ensure quality is central to our, design, development and process.
4. Focus on People – Empowerment
The quality of your quality culture is often the number one criterion that employees look at when evaluating your company. Employees want to work here where they feel valued and appreciated. The best way to get employees excited is to focus on their people. People factor is the foremost item to run a successful organization. Responsibility, commitment and awareness towards quality products and services should be part of their goal and given high priority.
The feedback you get from your management, people, and customers is very valuable, no matter how it’s packaged. Sometime this may be bitter.
5. Embrace and Celebrate Feedback – It is your Door to New Opportunities
Feedback has become a more important part of our culture than before. It opens doors to opportunities for growth and profits. The feedback you get from your management, people, and customers is very valuable, no matter how it’s packaged. Sometime this may be bitter. For example, if the customer wants feedback on a change we made, they’ll come to us with questions and suggestions for us to try out. This may sound trivial, but a lot of people won’t have this kind of feedback. This is why it’s so important for any business to embrace and celebrate feedback.
It is amazing that how many people think feedback is something you can give to customers like coupons for free stuff—but it isn’t that way. It becomes so much more.
Feedback is a great incentive to get people to stop focusing on the work and start focusing on their customers. We love to listen from our customers “Hey, you took it just right.” And then turn to our team to celebrate. Feedback help us listen to our customers, address quality issues at the root cause of problems until they don’t occur anymore, and working proactively to prevent them from occurring again.
6. Develop a Culture that Is Inclusive
Your customers want their voice heard, if not for everything they say, then at least for things they feel strongly about. This is the culture that all employees, especially senior leaders in leadership, need to create. Quality culture should be a habit for all. It should not be limited to like minded people in the organization that is only available to certain members of the employee group. If existing, this leads to group thinking and result in quality deterioration and people disengagement over time. To implement a healthier quality culture, you also want to include members from all parts of the organization even if their role is not critical in making of your products or delivering service.
Conclusion
Achieving organizational goals is much easier if you have a quality culture set up in your company. This will help prevent mistakes, and ensure that every customer gets what they paid for on time, every time. Most people have never heard of quality culture. It’s the practice of creating a culture in your organization that prioritizes quality above all else. This means addressing quality at the root cause of problems until they don’t occur anymore, and working proactively to prevent them from occurring again. In the next article, we’ll show you how to level up your quality culture so you can successfully achieve your goals and take your business to the next level. Stay tuned!
Fun Fact
The Six Types of Human Error are:
1) Slips,
2) A run-on sentence,
3) Word confusion,
4) Typo,
5) Transposition,
and 6) Omission.
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