
Overcoming challenges to building a quality culture

Building a quality culture is essential for organisations striving to exceed and maintain ambitious standards and continuous improvement. In the second of two blogs, Mitch Reed CQP MCQI, Quality Manager, CloudNC, follows up with insights on how organisations can successfully foster and embed a quality culture.
Fostering a quality culture comes with its own set of challenges, from building alliances and gaining leadership support to demonstrating the added value of your quality initiatives. What are the common obstacles faced when embedding a quality culture? Let us explore this, along with methods of overcoming these barriers. Developing a better understanding of these challenges will ensure the success we desire in achieving a quality driven mindset.
Building alliances
Building alliances is critical towards embedding your quality culture. It is not only your stakeholders that matter, but also the people and departments around you that play a significant role in your organisation’s success story. A problem shared is a problem best positioned to be corrected and prevented.
Quality reaches all areas of the business, so it is important for us to understand our pain points. Fostering a quality culture is not the responsibility of one department alone. Breaking down silos and promoting cross-departmental collaboration leads to improved communication and empowered shared responsibility.
When departments work together towards common quality goals, they start to see each other as allies rather than competitors.
Mitchell Reed CQP MCQI, Quality Manager
Gaining leadership support
Leaders play a vital role in fostering a quality culture, they set a precedence when driving business goals and objectives. This is particularly important when it comes to allocating time and resources to an initiative. The leadership’s strategic goals must encourage teams and departments to cross-collaborate.
Leaders are at the forefront of accountability and continuous improvement; by inspiring their teams to do the same, this will propel that movement and engrain any process and policy into the core values of those teams and individuals.
The value of quality initiatives
Even though it can be considered boastful, it does feel good at times to be able to say, ‘I told you so!’, and there is no better feeling than saying this after demonstrating a value-add solution to your business, but how do we get to that first and foremost?
Thanks to continuous improvement tools and methodologies, we have a multitude of options. However, before we explore these resources, one of the challenges will be overcoming resistance to change. Employees including middle managers and senior leadership can be hesitant to embrace new processes, particularly if they perceive them as disruptive or unnecessary.
To resolve this, it is essential to make a compelling case towards the problem you are trying to solve. Align quality initiatives with the organisation’s top priorities and start by tying quality initiatives to clear, measurable business outcomes.
If quality initiatives can reduce rework or improve customer satisfaction, then quantify the financial impact of these changes.
Mitchell Reed CQP MCQI, Quality Manager
Leaders and teams are more likely to embrace quality when they see how it will directly influence those desired goals. Once you have buy-in, turn your initiative or project into a showcase that allows you to tell the story from problem definition to problem solution. You can then focus on sustaining those gains and delivering more value-add initiatives for your organisation.
Interested in learning more about building a quality culture? Explore our other blogs for further insights, strategies and success stories to help you drive quality excellence in your organisation.
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