The Question of Trust
By redirecting our focus to Trust, the 2018 world quality day is asking us pause and look at the intangibles of what we do, like, the relationships we nurture as an organization, and the core values of integrity and honesty we tend to promote.
This theme addresses the importance of trust and the role that all stakeholders have in building and maintaining it. As it relates to quality, trust is a vague concept and it is somewhat of an odd choice for the quality management sector, which deals predominantly with repeatable, measurable steps, but by bringing the focus to trust, World Quality Day 2018 is beckoning on our human relationships in the organization and how it translates to improving our quality management.
Organizational competence can be linked the theme of Trust as an effective quality management system builds and invests in organizational competence, which allows businesses to deliver on their promises and provides a framework for addressing complaints and performance issues when they arise. Now this in turn will build trust among the stakeholders – customers, clients and employees.
More importantly, quality management creates a culture in which all participants are invested in a cycle of continuous improvement. In other words, the trust becomes mutual, employees trust they have the tools to do their jobs correctly, management trusts that employees are invested in the process, and customers and other stakeholders trust in the results.
NQA gives several ways we can help build a trust-based culture in our organizations and these include;
- Helping organizations understand the broader context of their customers’ expectations
- Building engagement and leadership at the management level, to ensure an organization’s values and goals align with those of their stakeholders
- Enabling stronger operational governance by developing and implementing quality management systems
- Helping organizations identify risks and threats to their reputation, and establishing metrics for monitoring their performance on an ongoing basis
- Identifying where investments — in new systems, additional training, more staff or other improvements — will deliver the most value.
Looking at the role trust plays in the quality management, we see that it provides a way of contextualizing our work that numbers, audits and performance reports can’t.
As professionals, it is our job to make quality management and trust-building a part of our daily routine so that the term ‘Quality’ is not even used but has simply become the way we do business.