5 Ways to Embrace Quality Mindfulness

Quality is about doing the right thing, at the right time, for the right reasons. But let’s take it a step further with “quality mindfulness.” This is an approach that delivers a consistent and exceptional customer experience. It’s an established mindset that commits the team to delivering reliable services in a seamless manner.

We practice Incident, Problem and Change Management to document the issue, resolution and trouble-shooting efforts. We use this discipline to investigate opportunities to work better together and understand why these reoccurring issues continue to impact the business. Our responsibility to our customers is to always deliver quality equipment and services.

When quality is not top-of-mind, the standards and results are compromised. After troubleshooting, diagnosing and creating workarounds until we ultimately resolve it, we should ask ourselves: “Why and how did this issue occur and was it something caused by a lack of quality management?”

The team should always work together to better understand why reoccurring issues occur and what we can do to identify the who, what, where when, how and why.

I first learned of W. Edwards Deming and Total Quality Management (TQM) while researching why Toyota was able to beat other car manufacturers in sales by offering well-made, reliable cars at the same or less cost. Deming identified a particular set of rules and created a checklist, The Deming Cycle, which shows how to continually improve the quality standards of a company.

This is a simple, yet straightforward group of steps that can drastically help improve quality standards by either providing newer solutions or solving existing problems.

Quality mindfulness is not just a goal, but a passion. It drives us to meet and exceed our customer’s expectations flawlessly. It is a commitment to reliability, uniqueness, efficiency, convenience, ease of use, durability and integrity. These characteristics form the bedrock of our approach to quality.

Here’s how to implement a “quality mindfulness” attitude within your team:

1. Engage and involve other team members.
2. Challenge the operational checklist of how you always do it by modifying what’s no longer relevant, what not working and what needs to be added/updated.
3. Patience, planning and being proactive are the important factors. Don’t rush to failure just because you are under pressure or told to do so.
4. Devise a plan to make every process more efficient and productive with an established date to assess and review. Remember, execute the plan first and then, measure the results.
5. Make an individual and team commitment to hold yourself and others accountable to “Get the job done” while always sharing and communicating with stakeholders.