Employee engagement

What’s This ‘Cost Of Quality’ Thing?

Now that you’re getting ready for Virtual Audits, it’s time to look into the ‘Cost of Quality’ concept. All the ideas apply to Environmental, Health and Safety and all other management systems. How are we making sure our systems are giving us value? What kind of resource allocation should we make to this activity? To […]

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What’s YOUR Problem?!?

When making your non-conformance (problem) statement, be sure to choose words that will get the response that you’re looking for. Stating a non-conformance as, “The operator did not follow the procedure” will set the root cause analysis back 30 years. Statements that identify a person as the problem will only end in disaster. Statements like

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Supercharge Your Internal Audits!

Internal Auditing has been around since before dirt. Some organizations really do a great job and find improvements – this earns a return the investment. Others do it to make the Registrar happy and could do without the grief. This approach ends up costing them money and is a drain on resources. To supercharge your

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Improvement – Our Path to Success!

ISO Clause 10 requires Improvement – in fact, the word improvement appears 24 times in ISO 9001. And we all know that we have to tweak things continually to stay just a bit ahead of the competition. If we’re not getting better, it’s going to feel as if we’re falling behind. Non-conformances are a great

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Rounding Up Our Resources – ISO Clause 7

To deliver what your customer wants, you need resources! The better you manage them, the more profitable you’ll be. The better motivated your people are, the more resilient your organization will be, even in the Public Service – you’ll be more likely to stay within your budget if you manage your assets and your activities

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Customer Data – Now What??

The last two posts got us on the road to ‘understanding customers better’. By the time we’ve gathered information on our customers’ perceptions of how well we met their expectations, we could be lost in the weeds. ISO 10004 has some more guidelines on what to do next in Clauses 7.4 and 7.5… 1. Analyze

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Make ISO Pay!

Since the 1987 version of ISO 9001 was released, we’ve been hearing organizations groan about being ISO Registered or Certified. Here are some ideas to get value out of your system. #1 Make Internal Audits pay dividends by hunting for Opportunities for Improvement instead of just looking for conformance to procedures. Poorly written procedure? Poor

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Celebrate Your Way to Success!

People aren’t you best asset, engaged people who are excited about working in your organization are your best asset. Not only that, celebrating small wins and big wins can help meet some ISO requirements – Leadership (5.1.1 h), Customer focus (5.3), Awareness (7.3) and others. In order to move the needle in this direction, consider

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The Power of Recognition

You can show recognition to your folks without spending any money! Bob Nelson has some great ideas in the latest version of his book 1001 Ways to Reward Employees.  Rebecca Boyle of the Empire of America Federal Saving Bank points out that, “Any time you make people feel better about themselves you are building motivation”.

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Two Pitfalls of e-Learning…and How to Avoid Them

Ruth Clark and Richard Mayer have outlined some pitfalls of e-learning design in their book ‘e-Leaning and the Science of Instruction’ If you ever purchase e-learning, take be aware of these pitfalls to avoid buying an inferior training course: Pitfall #1: Losing Sight of the Job Courses must be designed to address the specific skill

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