Audits and Assessments

Audits & Assessments

Changing business behaviour for sustainability

Quality is often viewed as focusing on technical issues such as processes, measurements, auditing, documentation and improvement and often associated with its own set of tools, jargon, standards and models of excellence. While this has served quality well, many quality professionals and certainly an increasing number of business leaders are questioning its value. They’ve done it and reached a certain level – now they want to know what’s next.If that is the case, how do we meet this challenge? Certainly not by throwing out the past, but by building on it, creating a vision of quality that excites both business leaders and quality professionals alike. So what could this vision be based upon? Two key things need to be considered, the first being recent events in the financial system. These have brought into sharp focus the need to understand and manage the real world – what people actually do, not what they say they do or write down – in other words, their behaviour. The other business imperative is the need to create sustainable businesses. Sustainability and therefore quality in this case is defined as an appropriate mix of economic, social and environmental performance, with no single element dominating the others as they have done in the past.The vision therefore needs to be about quality becoming more business and people orientated, without losing its roots. So what competence, tools and techniques may be needed to realise this vision? Just think about a world where existing tools and techniques are accepted and used, but with new approaches and methods equipping quality professionals to:

understand that a management system is the real world. It is the organisation including everyone in it and everything it does. This means that when auditing, using questions such as ‘show me your management system’ don’t exist, because they do not tell you anything about its real world use.
demonstrate the level of internal and business-wide skills needed to engage with others in this real-world system at all levels, speaking about quality in their business language.
understand how other management disciplines such as business planning, stakeholder engagement, finance, marketing, risk management and sales combine in the real-world management system to deliver business objectives. As quality professionals, we need to be all-rounder’s, using our competence to engage with others, becoming the organisational glue.
understand and audit behaviours to identify risks to meeting business/sustainability objectives. Perhaps auditing is replaced by performance management based on risk, taking a number of feeds of information to provide a more rounded picture. Change experts know that real change is achieved by changing personal and business behaviour. In the 21st century the future role of quality must be firmly rooted within a business world, helping to bring about changes to business behaviour to achieve more sustainable and successful businesses.

Take action

Are you ready to learn more, embrace this new business world and become more valuable to your organisation? The future is coming and quality is changing so it is wise to start planning now.

Take action challenge

Review what you do and the way your management system is defined. Does it really represent how your organisation delivers its economic, social and environmental objectives?
Take a critical look at your auditing. Do you audit the impact of people’s behaviours, what they actually do?

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