Reflection from #WQW22: "Quality conscience: Doing the right thing"

Most companies celebrated Quality Week (#WQW22) from 7-11 November,2022. The theme for this year’s celebration is aptly described as “Quality conscience: Doing the right thing”?{Ref - https://www.quality.org/WQW22}. This has hit the nail on the head as every quality conscious organization is striving hard to work to improve quality at the foundational (mindset/cultural) level

While some organizations hosted a series of value-added webinars, roadshows, quality walks, others managed to celebrate with a sprinkle of tokenism (painting, cake cutting, slogan contest etc.)

The two popular messages that did the rounds were ‘every day is a Quality day’ and ‘Quality is a team sport’. They may be clichés but emphatically true.

Quality is not achieved by just applying quality tool kit and establishing elaborate QA/QC processes, it is necessary but not sufficient. Most importantly, quality is achieved when each individual involved in the value chain, adopts a quality conscious mindset. When each individual action is driven by an elevated thought of ‘well-being’ of the company. Two masons, making the same brick wall were asked the question on why they are making the wall. The first mason said “because my boss asked me to do, so I get paid” while the second mason said “so my village gets the hospital, and my fellow villagers do not have to travel to another city for treatment”. Same work, same pay, but different mindset towards action, hence different levels of motivation and quality.

If the mindset/conscience of each individual, involved in the value chain is dictated by a sense of well-being of the company, then both motivational level and quality level will be drastically improved.

When the customer gets a poor-quality product it shows the company in poor light, which eventually impacts the financial and non-financial wellbeing of the company.

Why does the customer get a poor-quality product? Because the concerned people in the value chain could not (or did not?) detect the quality issue as it went past them. Can each upstream process owner (stage gate owner) be measured by how much time their downstream counterparts had to spent on 1-clarifying the issues with upstream counterparts, 2-issuing change/deviation notices and 3- reworking, because of quality leakage from upstream process. Lesser the time spent by down stream process owners on addressing the above issues would allude to higher Quality Consciousness of upstream process owner.

If someone arrives late in the meeting and keeps everyone waiting, and if the company has the right culture, then that person will be morally bound to think s/he has given disrespect to others and ensure it does not happen next time. Similarly, if a sense of high-Quality Consciousness pervades all across the organization, then the upstream people would be morally bound to think as giving disrespect to their downstream counterparts for forcing them to spend extra time to address the above mentioned issues. Can we assess or discern whether the upstream person’s action is determined by sense of compliance (boss/process asked me to do) or by the sense of well being of the organization (wellbeing and customer delight)

No wonder, it will be expected from every modern leader to drive quality culture transformation in their organization, so the quality is addressed not just from the tools/processes/adherence point of view but also from quality consciousness (mindset, company well-being) point of view. The leaders need to ensure the technical structure (tools, processes) blends with the social structure(culture, mindset) of the organization, so that every individual becomes Quality Conscious and considers "well being of the company" as the basis for determining action and hence gravitate towards operating from the upper right quadrant in the 2*2 matrix shown below below

These were my thoughts; It would be great to hear thoughts from other quality leaders.

#qualitymanagement #qualityleadership #wqw22