What is Total Quality Management(TQM)?

Total Quality Management (TQM) is used as an effective strategy to make your company gain competitive advantage. Generally, it is proven to be an effective process for the improvement of organizational functions when properly installed. But not all organizations or company are appropriate and ready for TQM. For it requires preconditioning, leadership commitment to a large-scale, long term, cultural change, to make it successful.

A lot of business owners are eager to adopt TQM and implement it abruptly in their system, failing to realize that their employees and the whole company itself are not yet prepared and ready for substantial changes. This will lead them to a worse scenario resulting to employees' conflict, disappointments and unproductive outputs.

The implementation of Total Quality Management should be centered to continuous improvement of both products and processes, with accurate measurement of activities, empowerment of people and intense focus on customer satisfaction. It cannot be built in one day or two but requires a long term commitment from all the people involved.

TQM is not just simply change in company rules and policies. It's totally more than that for it includes change in an organization's culture, its norms, values, and belief systems about how the company functions. It is also involves change in its political system, pertaining to the process of decision making and power bases.

Once TQM is being implemented within the company, there are several quality control tools can be used that will help measure operational activities to ensure its effectiveness. These are process flowchart, check sheets, cause and effect diagrams, Pareto analysis, scatter diagrams, histograms, run charts and control charts. Results from these monitoring tools are good representation of how the process is improving.

Resistance is one great hindrance to the success of TQM implementation. For it is normal for people to resist change and have fear of losing their position or work. One key element to make this work is to involve your employees in the TQM process. Increasing their participation in decision making about various aspects of the process will elevate their feeling of sense of ownership in what is decided and they will be committed to their own resultant outcomes.

Always remember that Total Quality Management should be purpose driven. Management should be very clear on the company's vision for the future and stay focused on it. Leaders will need to maintain their commitment, keep the process visible, provide needed support, and hold people accountable for the results. It is a difficult, comprehensive and continuous process that is hard to accept in the beginning but with full cooperation, can become part of the norms and be a powerful technique for enhancing employee's creativity and full utilization of their potential that can improve the total service to clients.