We have talked about the meaning of being quality focused before, and in that article, author Haward Mendez concluded that:
- To be quality-focused, one must have an eye for detail, be aware of every part of the process, and especially be willing to create value for the customer.
Check out this article to dig deep into the specifics of what it means to be quality-focused and how Haward reached that conclusion.
Now that the concept of being quality-focused is clear, the next step is to think about what you can do to become more quality-focused or to have a more quality-focused business. And as someone who works in a quality-focused company, I had the opportunity to talk with managers and the HR team to summarize the following:
Top 5 Key Habits of a Quality-Focused Company.
Innovation, creativity, and resourcefulness are all excellent qualities that a company should have, and that will surely help you to get your business going and improve it to a certain level. However, to truly compete and excel in the market, you need not only a good product or service but a quality business model.
To ensure long-term success, your business needs to spread the mission of delivering quality throughout your whole organization: quality products, quality customer service, quality employee recognition, and quality goals.
When your company is driven by quality, by being able to inspire the best in your employees and deliver the best results to clients, success will follow. It is not enough to have only a good product without selling it or attending to customers the right way, the quality way.
If you don’t know how to get started, these are the top 5 habits your company can follow to become more quality-focused:
1. Set Clear Expectations:
To achieve quality, it is necessary to first define it and how to reach it. This is done by setting clear expectations and goals for your employees and creating standards and protocols for everyone to follow.
It’s your job to create a roadmap for your employees to follow, one that leads to efficient goals, both personal and company goals. In this roadmap, you need to clearly define your expectations for your employees since this is the guide they will follow to achieve quality results. Remember that this roadmap needs to have plenty of room for individual expression and personal style in order not to hinder your employees’ creativity.
A good way to create this roadmap is to set SMART Goals:
SMART stands for:
S – Specific
M – Measurable
A – Attainable
R – Relevant
T – Timely
Setting SMART Goals will help you create better and more consistent goals for your employees to follow since It will help them to be aware of what the desired outcomes are, how those outcomes will be measured, and how their team members plan to achieve those outcomes.
It’s also a plus on accountability, and if you want to learn more about it make sure to read: Accountability through Empathy: How to set clear boundaries for your team.
2. Collect and Analyze Data:
Collecting and analyzing your past data will help you understand which aspects of your business went right and which could’ve gone better. It could be a social media post, website traffic, an article, an ad, etc. Collecting and following that data will allow you to continue doing what works and improve and change what doesn’t work.
Doing this will bring you some incredible businesses to every aspect of your business, such as:
- Personalized customer experience. Collect customer data from different channels, including physical retail, e-commerce, and social media. By using data analytics to create comprehensive customer profiles from this data, you can gain insights into customer behavior to provide a more personalized experience. This can also be used to create targeted social media campaigns.
- Streamlined operations. You can improve operational efficiency through data analytics. Gathering and analyzing data about the supply chain can show where production delays or bottlenecks originate and help predict where future problems may arise. It can also help you to optimize your inventory levels by determining optimal supply based on factors such as seasonality, holidays, and secular trends.
- Enhanced security. All businesses face data security threats. You can use data analytics to diagnose the causes of past data breaches by processing and visualizing relevant data. For instance, the IT department can use data analytics applications to parse, process, and visualize their audit logs to determine the course and origins of an attack. This information can help IT locate vulnerabilities and patch them.
3. Invest in capacity.
When a company is stretched thin on resources, it lowers the probability of consistently delivering quality. And to be a quality-focused organization, you must always strive to overdeliver. That means making sure you always have the capacity to fulfill employees’ and customers’ needs.
Investing in capacity is expensive, but it will allow your business to withstand shifts or disruptions by allocating and redirecting your resources based on current and future needs. Look to reinvest in your company’s mission. This means focusing on continually improving the operating systems and business functions that support resource generation and high performance, such as information and data systems, professional development, high-quality physical spaces, marketing and fund development, and risk-taking.
At the end of the day, investing in capacity will help you ensure that your company always delivers quality with 100% efficiency, and even though expensive, the fact that you are going to stop losing customers will pay for itself.
4. Promote from within.
Nowadays, it’s common for companies to constantly hire new employees. This is due to the high increase in employees changing jobs and companies after working in them for 6-18 months.
Companies nowadays don’t invest in quality employees. These companies lose valuable workers when another company offers them a salary more significant than the one they offer. And even though salary expectation is one of the most critical aspects for employees, you also have to care about the employee levels of engagement in your company.
When employees are happy and engaged with your company, they are prone to excel at their work and encourage their team to do so as well. This article explains employee engagement and how you can improve it and retain employees in your business.
Back on the topic, to avoid losing valuable employees you have to pay more attention to your current employees’ wishes and a bit less attention to recruiting. Look for current employees who possess the characteristics of your best performers, and create mentoring relationships and employee training programs to bring them along.
Recruiting employees from within has the added benefit that they will already understand your company’s products and services. And promoting from within tends to help you reduce your overall turnover rate, which will in turn help you achieve ever higher standards of execution.
5. Celebrate victories.
You get more of the behavior you reward. Don’t just address poor performance, but make sure that everyone, from the top down, knows of the results and receives recognition based on their results and efforts for the things that are going well.
Make sure to highlight employees and teams that are doing exceptionally well and involve all employees in brainstorming ways to improve the unsatisfactory things. Everyone has a different take on solving an issue, so try to have open conversations with no wrong answers.
Once you celebrate your employees’ victories with promotions, bonuses, rewards, or even just words of congratulations, you’ll see their levels of engagement and productivity go up!
Focus On What Matters
Quality-focused is allocating your focus and business efforts to what truly matters: Customer service, employee recognition, communicating goals and feedback, accountability, etc. It’s about focusing on delivering quality in all aspects of your business.
If you already follow some of the habits we talked about in this article, it means that you are already on your way to having a more quality-focused company.
Now that you know your next step, what’s left is to take it.
See more articles by Ender Cárdenas.
