TEAM CONCEPTS AND QUALITY MANAGEMENT

There has been a distinct move from “quality assurance” to “quality improvement’.  But roles and responsibilities in many industries tend to follow the traditional modes where there are organizational charts that illustrate a department structure.

            It’s the case where the managers work as a leadership team, distinct from the front-line staff.  They participate in traditional managerial roles that include responsibility for managing risk and quality of the service within the organization.  While the front-line staff see their role as an implementation of new of new strategies that they have had very little involvement in developing.  The front-line staff may resist the changes due to:

·         Not being fully aware of the rational

·         Not feeling that they are responsible for the outcome

·         Feeling that their degree of involvement in the implementation is superficial.

The culture now is to promote a quality improvement atmosphere where everyone shares in the responsibility.  There exist some barriers when attempting to be more inclusive in participation in quality improvement initiatives:

·         Resources constraints (both economic and human)

·         Limitation of additional finance and staff hours

·         Pressing existing workloads where there is the need to get the work done and thus making it difficult to schedule

·         Time as in getting groups together to provide input and to plan quality improvement.

·         Time as in to allow those group to function effectively in new team-based context.

Other barriers are:

·         No clear linkage between quality indicator and financial outcomes resulting in low level of commitment from the management in allocating resources

·         Fear

·         Pacing

·         Timing

·         Sequencing

Strategies to overcome the barriers:

·         Creative scheduling to unable participation

·         Getting the right people involved

·         Adult learning as in gaining staff understanding of the importance of their involvement.

·         Linking the learning to real-life practical applications

·         Listening to what matters most to clients

Organizational improvement initiatives often fail because they attempt to do too much, too soon.  It is much more gratifying to have early successes with small improvements than failing at an over-ambitions attempts at great selecting changes.  It is important that these small improvement be linked to an overall larger change.

                                                     

Shared from article by

Allen Crimshaw

In Better Life

Accountants Today

February 2006