Quality Week 2024: from compliance to performance!

Have you ever heard of World Quality Week? If you and your company seek excellence, you cannot miss this opportunity to celebrate, learn from, and share the best practices for quality in your organization.

Here’s how to take advantage of Quality Week to create a relaxed journey full of insights on how to reach your full competitive potential through quality.

What is Quality Week?

World Quality Week is an annual campaign promoted by the Chartered Quality Institute – (CQI), a British institution that globally represents the quality management profession. The objective of this week is to raise awareness about the importance of quality for the success of organizations and for the well-being of people.

The Chartered Quality Institute is the driving force behind quality enhancement. In practice, it is a community of professionals passionate about quality. Through this community, CQI offers training, certifications, and resources to help organizations achieve excellence in quality.

Thus, the organization plays a key role in empowering quality professionals by providing them with the tools and knowledge they need to drive quality in their organizations.

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Quality Week 2024 Theme: “From Compliance to Performance”

For 2024, CQI has chosen the theme “From compliance to performance”. With this choice, the organization encourages companies to explore ways to use quality principles to go beyond compliance with standards and regulations. The idea is to use quality as a tool of superior performance.

To achieve this goal, Quality Week 2024 is divided into two components: quality and performance.

Quality – Companies cannot forget the importance of standards and guidelines, which help to understand and execute the work in a compliant manner. Although some professionals fear that they may bureaucratize the company, they are the kick-off towards excellence. After all, the standards/guidelines establish standards to be followed, allowing for improvements and optimization of processes without affecting quality.

Performance – To achieve greater performance, it is essential to deliver more and better, fulfilling all predetermined requirements. For this, quality is fundamental, as it organizes processes and establishes standards, helping to understand and meet customer expectations. Therefore, compliance with standards and regulations is the first step to optimizing quality and thus achieving superior performance, with better products/services, made available faster and at lower costs.

Quality: Reaching Your Competitive Potential

Quality Week reinforces how it is one of the main factors that determine the value perceived by customers and that influences their satisfaction and loyalty. In addition, quality contributes to the reduction of waste, rework, complaints and risks, thus improving the efficiency and profitability of the organization.

But how to achieve and maintain a high level of quality in an increasingly dynamic, complex and demanding environment? This is where the role of quality management comes in, which is the set of principles, methods, tools, and processes that aim to ensure and continuously improve the quality of an organization’s products, services, and processes.

It involves everything from strategic planning to operational control, including leadership, organizational culture, people involvement, data analysis, innovation, and learning.

Quality management also requires a systemic and integrated view of all aspects that affect it. This requires considering the needs and expectations of stakeholders, such as customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, regulators, the community, and the environment. Only in this way can quality management create value for these stakeholders, generating mutual and sustainable benefits.

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How to participate in World Quality Week 2024?

Use Quality Week as an opportunity to evaluate your processes, identify areas for improvement, and align your strategies so that quality is your differentiator.

For this, remember that there is no single recipe or the right way to participate in this date. You can use your creativity and adapt the activities to your context and your goals. The important thing is that you involve the teams, disseminate good practices, recognize the results, stimulate reflection and encourage continuous improvement.

To help you in this mission, we have separated some ideas and suggestions on how you can incorporate World Quality Week 2024 into your company:

Do prior planning: define the objectives, the target audience, the schedule, the budget, the resources and the responsibilities of the activities you intend to carry out during these days. Align your actions with the theme proposed by CQI and with your company’s strategy. Communicate and engage the people involved and get the support of senior management.

Hold lectures, workshops, webinars or podcasts: take advantage of this week to share knowledge and experiences about quality with your employees, customers, suppliers or partners. You can invite internal or external experts, present success stories, show market trends and news, and discuss the challenges and opportunities of quality in your area of expertise, among other relevant topics.

Promote contests, quizzes, games, or scavenger hunts: create playful and interactive activities to test and expand people’s knowledge about quality. You can devise Q&A, practice challenges, simulations, or scenarios related to quality. You can award participants with gifts, certificates, or other forms of recognition.

Hold an exhibition, a trade show or a showroom: show people which products, services or processes stand out for their quality in your company. You can exhibit samples, prototypes, models, or videos that illustrate the characteristics, benefits, and differentials of quality. You can also invite customers or suppliers to submit their testimonials or feedback on quality.

Conduct an audit, an evaluation or a benchmarking: take advantage of this week to check and measure the level of quality of your company. You can conduct an internal or external audit, a performance review, or a satisfaction survey. You can use tools such as checklists, indicators, questionnaires, or interviews. Also compare your results with those of other companies in your industry or with market benchmarks.

Implement an improvement, innovation, or solution: Use World Quality Week to implement a continuous improvement, innovation, or solution to a quality-related problem in your company. You can use methods such as PDCA, DMAIC, A3, or Design Thinking. Involve people in identifying root causes, generating ideas, selecting alternatives, executing actions, and evaluating results.

Make an acknowledgment, a thank you or a celebration: take advantage of these days to recognize and value the people who contribute to the quality in your company. You can make a formal or informal recognition, individual or collective, public or private. Also thank and praise people for their dedication and performance. Celebrate and celebrate with the entire organization the results achieved.

These are just a few ideas on how you can participate in World Quality Week 2024 in your company. Adapt them to your reality or create your own activities! The important thing is that you don’t let this opportunity pass you by.

Conclusion

Now you know Quality Week 2024 and know how to implement several actions to make the most of this date. Also, take the time to evaluate new tools and practices that help drive quality and efficiency across your organization.

An example of this type of improvement is having a quality management system. With SoftExpert Suite, for example, you can: