How to build Inspection-Readiness through everyday Quality Habits

To build inspection-readiness within your organisation, you need a plan that goes beyond learning about the regulations, developing metrics, writing new procedures or creating another online learning module. You need a plan that takes into consideration human behavior and how we fail to develop what we call Quality habits.

Too often an ‘over-simplistic’ approach is used to improve Quality within complex organizations. When a Quality issue is identified, someone is tasked with writing a new procedure or measuring a quality threshold or developing an information campaign. And once the action is successful implemented, nothing changes. We take an action and believe that by making the decision, it will control the outcome. Organizations need to do more than providing training on new procedures and measuring training compliance, they need to measure proficiency in adopting new habits that take care of Quality deliverables.

There are many corporate behaviours that have a huge impact on the ability to achieve high Quality standards within an organisation if not carefully considered, for example:

• Often there is an assumption that information from Leadership to Management to Operators flows like water in a smooth, steady stream. The reality is that information flows through every organization more like a mountain river: the received information (when it is received) is often a distortion or degradation of the original message. This sometimes can also apply to members of the same team, thus creating the need for continuous updates of the data provided and consequently increasing the risk of mistakes.

• Constant email interruptions degrade the entire quality process. A sense of ‘false urgency’ is unfortunately a very common habit that brings an organisation away from achieving both short and long-term goals.

• At work, where workloads often exceed the available hours in the day, everyone at every level of the organization is calculating risks associated with their workloads and using the least effort to accomplish what they identify as ‘most important’, which rarely relates to quality.

The way to address the above common human behaviors that interfere with Quality in a regulated industry is to establish the so called Quality Habits across an organization and at all levels. Habits counteract the exceptions (e.g. “I’ll file that document later”; “I’m sure that will get covered in QC”; etc.) you make over and over until they become patterns not exceptions. Developing habits at an organizational level utilizes the same feedback loop that works on an individual level. The time is now, not tomorrow.

Seeking clarity of information and ensuring the message is well understood by your recipient, allocating time away from your inbox to complete your tasks or checking the urgency of a particular request are simple measures that can help improve the Quality of your daily work. And if every employees builds the same Quality Habits in their routine today, inspection-readiness will grow effortlessly in your organisation.