The WAC Files

Quality Management and Employee Involvement in an Enterprise

  

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The third quality management principle, 'involvement of people' brings us to an interesting discussion on employee involvement and motivation. The ISO website states, "People at all levels are the essence of an organization and their full involvement enables their abilities to be used for the organization's benefit." This quote raises the question, "How does an organization develop and sustain a culture of motivating employees to be fully involved within an organization?"

The Harvard Business Review article, 'Why Your Employees are Losing Motivation', suggests a different angle to the idea of employee motivation. David Sirota, Louis A. Mischkind, and Michael Irwin Meltzer suggest that you shouldn't focus so much on motivating employees, but rather on how to stop demotivating them.

The enthusiasm employees bring to their jobs initially can be maintained by understanding the goals that the majority of workers seek from their work:

• Equity: To be respected and to be treated fairly in areas such as pay, benefits, and job security.
•  Achievement: To be proud of one's job, accomplishments, and employer.
• Camaraderie: To have good, productive relationships with fellow employees.

How is your organization providing these three motivational goals to employees? Read the Harvard Business Review article for more on employee motivation.

The ISO 9000 Quality Management Principles outline some of the key benefits of greater involvement of employees in the organization:

• Motivated, committed and involved people within the organization.
• Innovation and creativity in furthering the organization's objectives.
• People being accountable for their own performance.
• People eager to participate in and contribute towards continuous improvement.

Would you like to learn more about better utilizing quality management principles and how they can transform your organization? Do you have a continuous improvement process in place, or are you considering certification for a quality standard? Do you want to control your internal processes cost effectively? The average percentage of business costs caused by poor quality (process failures and information scrape and rework) are 20-35%.

Join us for our upcoming quality management webinar on February 15th at 12:30pm ET to get an understanding of how you can better manage a lean quality compliant process. Visit our website to download our quality management whitepaper and view the 5 minute quality management software introductory video.