Reaffirming Organizational Support for Quality Management
Quality management is no longer the responsibility of one department or one individual, alone. Management should take place in self-managing teams.
Quality management, self-managing teams, and new forms of support and commitment
Quality management is no longer the responsibility of one department or one individual, alone. Management should take place in self-managing teams. Previously, products or services just needed to meet certain quality management specifications, demands, laws and regulations.
But modern quality management is a whole different beast altogether. This also means you’ll need to find new forms of support and commitment for quality management across your organisation.
Let’s run you through some best practices on how you can take your quality management to the next level.
Quality management: a holistic challenge
These days, quality management is more about guaranteeing outstanding quality across an entire organisation. Which is why commitment from your leadership is such an important condition for well-functioning quality management systems and departments.
One very important condition for proper food safety and other quality management systems is true commitment from your leadership team.
You’ll often see commitment from leadership translate into setting up a steering committee. This committee, in which all decision-makers from top management are present, will oversee the implementation and maintenance of your quality system.
Example: implementing FSSC 22000
Let’s take the implementation of FSSC 22000 as an example. During the implementation of this food safety certification, one team is used as a steering group to lead the entire project.
The function of this team is hugely important. During the project, they’ll meet regularly to perform management tasks, monitor the project’s progress, resolve questions from other teams, and allocate the resources needed to implement and coordinate the design of the new food safety management system (FSMS).
The steering committee will consist of top management members, representing each business unit. This gives the team the knowledge and authority it needs to make decisions and allocate resources to the project correctly.
Pitfalls: a lack of interest and commitment
One of the biggest pitfalls in quality management is that the organization lacks attention or interest in quality management, whether that’s positive or negative.
Employees know that quality is important, but often find the subject matter complicated and don’t consider it a priority in their work.
Reaffirming support: here’s what you can do today
Your number one priority for gathering support should be involving all employees in the field of quality management.
This doesn’t just mean training and coaching them. It also means trying to find new ways to make employees enthusiastic about managing and guaranteeing quality.
Organizational support is a theme central to the current transition to new business value systems, in which awareness, communication, and leadership regarding quality play an important role. Ensuring organizational support for quality management also fits in with a more holistic approach to quality, in which it is something by and for everyone within the organization.
Basically, support for quality management systems has rarely been as important as it is today.