INDIVIDUAL EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE-QUALITY PRODUCTION

Quality of production must be considered as part of productivity, because one alternative might be to produce more but at a lower quality. At one time, American goods suffered as a result of this trade-off. W. Edwards Deming, an American quality expert, argued that getting the job done right the first time—through pride in craftsmanship, excellent training, and an unwillingness to tolerate delays, defects, and mistakes—is important to quality production. Organizations throughout the world are proceeding on the quality front in many different ways, ranging from general training of workers on improving and maintaining quality to better engineering of products prior to manufacturing. One way in which organizations have focused on quality is by using international quality standards.

ISO 9000 A set of quality standards called the ISO 9000 standards has been derived by the International Standards Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. These standards cover everything from training to purchasing and are being implemented widely in European countries. Companies that meet the standards are awarded a certificate. The purpose of the ISO 9000 certification is to show that an organization has documented its management processes and procedures and has a trained staff so that customers can be confident that organizational goods and services will be consistent in quality.

TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT (TQM) Many organizations that have made major improvements in the quality of their operations have recognized that a broadbased quality effort has been needed. Total Quality Management (TQM) is a comprehensive management process focusing on the continuous improvement

of organizational activities to enhance the quality of the goods and services supplied.

TQM programs have become quite popular as organizations strive to improve their productivity and quality. At the heart of TQM is the concept that it is customer focused, which means that every organizational activity should be evaluated and analyzed to determine if it contributes to meeting customers’ needs and expectations. Another characteristic of TQM is the importance of employee involvement. Often, quality improvement teams of other group efforts are used to ensure that all employees understand the importance of quality and how their efforts affect quality. Benchmarking is another facet of TQM, in which quality efforts are measured and compared with measures both for the industry and for other organizations.

It is hoped that providing measurement information on quality will help to make continuous improvements in quality a part of the organizational culture.

For some organizations, the promises of TQM have been realized; but for others, TQM became a short-term program that later was dropped. A nationwide study of over 1,000 executives and managers found that only 45% of the organizations that had implemented TQM thought their programs had been

successful. However, some observers contend that quality concerns have become much more basic to the way work is done. They argue it is a widespread philosophy caused by competitive pressures. The idea of continuous improvement has indeed been built into the approaches of many producers of goods and services.