Building a quality driven culture
In the fifth of a six piece content series Mike Ayres examines each of the steps that businesses should take if they want to develop and drive a quality driven culture across their organisations.
Read the previous instalments on the quest to a quality driven business culture:
- How to articulate a quality driven culture.
- How to permeate a quality driven culture.
- How to empower a quality driven culture.
- How to standardise a quality driven culture.
Blame free
Blame is to place responsibility for something e.g. blame the crisis on poor planning. Blame free is of course the opposite – allowing workers to make mistakes without the fear of repercussions. There are potential pitfalls here but the benefits outweigh these.
Open and honest
Even with effective standards in place and a strong vision present throughout your business mistakes will happen from time to time. Your customers will understand that no company or individual is infallible. How problems and complaints are dealt with is more important and the potential to cement a long term relationship with that client or convert a passive client to an advocate for your business.
A blame free culture does not give employees licence to do whatever they want to do without fear of repercussion. Rather, it ensures that when mistakes are made they know that the best option is to be open and get the right solution put in place for that situation and move on.
Resolution
An open and honest culture developed from a blame free attitude will help improve the overall workforce as well. Rather than spending time assigning blame wherever fault is noted, this time can instead be focussed on identifying what caused the mistake in the first place.
This information can be fed back into future training to reduce the likelihood of reoccurrence. By making your team feel safe about reporting issues, the business can benefit from this new information and improve the customer experience.
Risk
We have touched on this earlier, but there is an underlying fear that by removing the notion of blame, employees will be less thorough and less cautious in their approach to their jobs. The danger is reduced by the way that the culture is communicated to them and by the reciprocal benefits on offer for not making these mistakes.
As well as having specialists in the business services sector, Menzies consultancy team can discuss your vision and values and provide further details and recommendations on how you can implement a quality driven culture.
To discuss further and see how we can help you contact Mike Ayres by email at mayres@menzies.co.uk or by phone on 01252 894911.
More for More – Six Steps to Instilling a Quality Driven Culture
A ‘more for more’ business culture is key to the future success of service sector businesses such as those in legal, recruitment, financial services, marketing and other professional services. Menzies Business Services Insights report details how to instil and maintain a quality driven culture.
Posted in Blog