(ISO) Quality Manual Chat

What do you think of the practice of posting your company’s quality policy on signs posted around your office and/or plant? Do you do it? Do you think it helps your employees remember the quality policy? Would it help during an audit? Do your employees really care?

If your quality policy is brief and to the point, you might want to consider posting signs stating your quality policy around your office and plant. While no one would suggest that posting signs will cause your employees to suddenly start caring about a vague quality system that they’ve heard about, signs certainly don’t hurt your cause.

If you decide to post your actual quality policy as controlled in your ISO9001:2000 quality management system, you must make sure that any changes in your quality policy are immediately reflected on your signs. It’s probably not the best idea to frequently change your quality policy, but having signs up gives you a bit more work to do, if you decide to change your quality policy.

I’ve heard it suggested to post small signs at everyone’s desk, or put your quality policy on everyone’s computer as a screen saver. Frequent, small reminders of your company’s quality policy are a good thing, but don’t push it too far. Being too pushy with your preaching can turn people against you, and you don’t want that.

One company I’ve worked with has a fairly convoluted quality policy. It’s not easily remembered by English speaking personnel, and completely unintelligible to the Spanish speaking folks who constitute a large percentage of the workforce here in lovely Southern California. In this case I would not recommend posting signs stating the quality policy word for word. Instead I would post signs reminding everyone that the company strives to increase customer satisfaction, and we want to continually improve our quality.

During an ISO9001:2000 audit, I don’t expect company employees to repeat their company’s quality policy verbatim. If they can tell me the essence of their quality policy, in their own words, that’s good enough for me. And if the employee can give me a personal example of what the quality system means to them, or how it affects the way they do their job, so much the better.

We'd like to hear your comments on this post (below).

This entry was posted on Monday, December 24th, 2007 at 1:25 am and is filed under ISO9001:2000 blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.