Maintaining a Quality Culture

Establishing a quality culture is a challenging undertaking for any organization. It is even more challenging to maintain a quality culture over time. The easiest thing in the world is to become complacent and let the organization’s culture begin to slip back into its old mold. In order to maintain a quality culture, organizations must foster the following criti­cal behaviors:⁷

1. Maintain an awareness of quality as a key cultural issue. This is accomplished through the regular dissemination of quality goals to all personnel and the corresponding results relating to these goals. Managers should “keep score” and let all stakeholders know what the score is.
2. Make sure that there is plenty of evidence of the man­agement’s leadership. Cheerleading is good, but it’s not enough. Managers should provide leadership in strate­gic planning for quality, serve on quality councils, and be actively involved in the implementation of quality initiatives. Employees need to see managers “walking the walk” as well as “talking the talk.”
3. Empower employees and encourage self-development and self-initiative among them. Managers should make sure that jobs are designed for as much self-control as possible, continually seek and use employee input, and encourage self-directed teamwork.
4. Keep employees involved. Do not just seek their in­volvement through empowerment: structure the orga­nization and its processes in ways that ensure it. This means making employees fully empowered members of the quality council; maintaining a system that makes it easy, convenient, and nonthreatening for them to rec­ommend improvements; and involving employees in areas, such as product or process design review.
5. Recognize and reward the behaviors that tend to nurture and maintain the quality culture. Recognition involves various forms of public acknowledgment. Rewards are tangible benefits, such as salary increases, bonuses, in­centives, and promotions.

Source: Goetsch David L., Davis Stanley B. (2016), Quality Management for organizational excellence introduction to total Quality, Pearson; 8th edition.