Corporate Unity: The Marriage Between HRD & Quality

For HR managers, the term quality is one that lives and breathes in every effort they are involved. From internal staff to contracted vendors, it is quality, of both product and service, which makes the difference between a successful venture and complete disappointment.

Human Resources has changed focus over the last 10 years from a department that dealt mainly with personnel files and policing a company to a more staff friendly entity. Subsequently, HRD, or Human Resource Development, was born.

The idea behind this transformation is that today people are a company’s greatest asset, and time and monies need to be spent in the development of this rich resource. The favorable cost-benefit or ROI is enjoyed when development directly impacts performance and consequently quality – as such, the marriage between HRD & Quality. In today’s business world, the marriage between HRD and quality is in direct contrast to the past where organizational standards were an obscure concept.

“The alignment of quality systems and procedures with an HRD agenda is a direction that quality experts believe will result in a highly trained, motivated and highly tenured staff,” explained Gary Maguire, Vice President of Group Quality for Crown Worldwide Group. “Systematically measuring employee performance, identifying training needs, developing training tools and testing for retention all result in highly skilled employees that will be able to grow and stay with their company.”

According to the American Society for Quality, the idea of quality is about more than tools and standardization process…it is about people.

There are, however, different ways to measure quality. HRD departments use a variety of simple interviewing and performance tools to complex Value Congruency and multiple Performance-Based Indicator tools, while the concept of quality also has its own smorgasbord of evaluative tools.

Six Sigma, a quality-measuring design many companies use to determine their performance level, uses a disciplined, data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating defects in any process -- from manufacturing to transactional and from product to service. The Six Sigma DMAIC process (define, measure, analyze, improve, control) is an improvement system for existing processes falling below specification and looking for incremental improvement.

Along the same lines, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) helps raise the level of quality, safety, reliability, efficiency, compatibility and interchangeability, and provide these benefits at an economical cost. They contribute to making the development, manufacturing and supply of products and services more efficient, safer, and cleaner.

These structured forms of measurement allow for a business to hold its workers to a higher standard, a standard that can be measured by statistical data. Of course, the less structured and more personal ways of measuring quality are still extremely useful.

For instance, when speaking from a customer’s perspective, quality is whatever the client says it is. It simply becomes what he expects from the product or service.

The Kano model, an explanation from QualityDigest.com supporting this theory, breaks quality down into three parts:

1. The Basic Q – This is what a company must provide, without which the customer would be dissatisfied.
2. The Customer Expected Q – Achieving all of the goals set forth prior to the service and satisfying the customer.
3. The Exciting Q – Providing a service for the customer he did not know existed or was even possible. This then becomes tomorrow’s expectation.

An even more basic definition of quality can be described as the “Wow” factor. This thought process comes from the idea that one would not want a significant other or spouse to define a moment or relationship with phrases like “That met the requirements” or “That had all the value I wanted.” The goal is to get the person to look into your eyes and say “Wow.”

The same could be said for the business world. An HRD director is constantly looking for the employees who make them take notice of the positive influence they are having on the customers and the company. Similarly, that same company’s employees are trying to elicit that positive response from customers.

This institutional premise is that quality, both internally and externally, is sweeping through the corporate world. With quality standards in place to help pick up the business flaws, HRD teams are now in the position to help correct those flaws and make sure the standards remain high. It seems this marriage between quality and HRD, though always improving, will last for decades to come.

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