Quality circles: A technique to empower floor level employees to touch the bottom line

Quality circle is a methodology to involve employees for more in decision making and shift the organisation towards a more participative culture. It is a risk-free way to begin and can be considered as a living tool that suits for any organisation to develop solutions in work base problems. 

The concept of quality circle encourages employee participation as well as it promotes teamwork and motivates people to contribute towards organisational effectiveness through group involvement. Not only it gives amazing outcomes but it also helps to facilitate designing of better systems in an organisations.

Japanese origin

As same as many other techniques, quality control circles also originated in Japan, in post-World War II scenario, as a result of the effort of recovering the economy. The introduction of quality circles in Japan was inspired by the lectures of W. Edwards Deming (1900-1993), a statistician for the US Government. He based his proposals on the experience gained from the US firms that operated under wartime industrial standards and argued that the practice of American management, giving more responsibility to line managers and engineers and less to line workers for quality control, should be reversed. 

Deming suggested redesigning of production processes to account more on quality control, and continuously educating all employees in a firm—from top to bottom—in quality control techniques and statistical control technologies. 

Dr. K. Ishikawa, one of the pioneers involved in this effort, pointed out the importance of education of shop floor employees apart from the management staff. He believed that elementary statistical knowledge is more important to the shop floor employees in order to maintain a better control in their day-to-day work. 

With the guidance of a knowledgeable foreman, one hour training per week started with “the foremen workshop study group”. While doing so, they understood the importance of practical knowledge in identifying tools correctly, so they selected work-related problems for their study. Dr. Ishikawa experimented on this idea, and introduced to world through his article in the inaugural issue of ‘Genba to QC’ magazine and later in his article named it ‘Quality Control Circle’.

American interest

American’s interest in Japanese quality control began in the early 1970s, when the US aerospace manufacturer Lockheed organised a tour to Japanese industrial plants. In return Japanese managers also started to visit US industries for knowledge sharing and effects for rapid spread in quality circles in America. By 1980, more than one-half of firms in the Fortune 500 had implemented or were planning to implement quality circles. 

But in the mid-2000s, especially in America, most of the quality circles have been put in to the dustbin of the management techniques. Most of the quality and productivity initiatives were inconsistent in implementation and hadn’t delivered their promises over the long run. One main reason for the failure was the lack of empowerment, quality circle members had no power and no one listened to them. 

Although a declining trend is experienced in quality circle in US, in Eastern, quality circle is still considered as an effective way of creating participative culture by empowering shop floor employees involve more in decision making. The emerging participants for the International Conference of Quality Control Circles (ICCQC) held once a year is evident for displaying such nature. 

The intention of the International Convention on Quality Control Circles (ICQCC) was made at the Korean Control Conference 1975 in Seoul. The Organising Committee of the Conference recognised the importance of having opportunity of exchanging ideas and experience on QC Circle activities among member countries and agreed to have an international conference periodically. For this reason, in 1976 the first International Convention on Quality Control Circle took place in Seoul and as the international convention progressed, the number of participating countries/regions have been increased. 

Sri Lanka still 

far behind

When compared with emerging nations in Asia, Sri Lanka is still far behind in utilising quality circles for productivity and quality improvements. In our neighbour country, India, more than 1,000 circles are functioning throughout the country at any given period. Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaysia, China and Taiwan are other examples for countries which use quality circles as their major quality initiative.

Organisations can use quality circles as an intervening or transitional device in moving towards more participative management system and culture. The significant feature of the QC circle is the encouragement of participation of shop floor employees towards organisational excellence through their collective intelligence. It encourages them to find solutions for work base problems through team work and finally to forward suggestions for continuous improvement. Thus the circle has the potential of making an important contribution to organisational performance. 

Encouragement of participation can improve by creating a link between Quality Circles and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs are quantitative and qualitative measures used to review an organisation’s progress against its goals. These cascade down and are set as targets for departments and individuals. Achievements of these targets are reviewed at regular intervals. The problem can be identified as the gap between targeted and achieved level of KPI measurement and quality circle can be created to bridge these gaps. 

Visibility of achievement of daily KPIs, even for shop floor employees, is important for this, where all the deviation can be highlighted and employees must be facilitated to form teams on their own to find the solutions and share the success. This can be seen as somewhat radical change as in most of the organisations KPIs follow-up is done by top levels from the frontline managers. 

A living tool

The concept of quality circle can be expanded more, rather than only in bridging the gaps but even in improvements of KPIs. Here Prasad L.M has given a wide definition for quality circle as a volunteer group composed of members who meet to talk about workplace and service improvements and make presentations to management with their ideas (Prasad, L.M, 1998). 

Accordingly quality circle can be identified not only as the problem solving tool but as the living tool exist for organisational improvement. Edward E. Lawler, in his article ‘Quality Circles after the fad,’ explained ways of moving quality circles to other forms of group activities such as task forces, organisational wide suggestion groups, self-managed teams or semiautonomous work groups. 

Task forces composed of people from different departments and at different organisational levels to work on organisation-wide problems. Self-managed teams are intact work groups where team members assume responsibility for performing many of the functions for day-to-day decision making concerning their work. 

Most important towards this change is the awareness of all employees relevant to the importance of such KPIs for organisational survival as well the continuous development of the organisation and its members. Further the broad education of relevant fields such as quality and productivity improvement tools and problem solving techniques are important for finding solutions.

Continuous learning

Success of the participative culture and the quality circle is not dependent only on education of shop floor employees; Joseph Juran, one of the two American post-war germinators of the quality idea, considered that quality circles are useless if the company’s management is not trained in the more general principles of TQM. 

Continuous learning of all organisational members is one of the critical factors for the success of such participative culture which must be tailored to the traditions. Training only managers and not the employees who really utilise the new solutions is one of the weaker approaches for the quality circles; trained managers who assign themselves as leaders and maintain the existing hierarchy within the team will shrink new ideas and dilute the purpose. 

At the beginning all must be well aware relevant to the benefits of the quality circle; financial and non financial, organisational as well individual benefits must be communicated properly. Ignoring real problems and focusing on trivia based on personal agendas or for other reasons is another weak approach. Group members become frustrated when they are unable to initiate needed changes in suggested areas, particularly when they see a close relationship between the problems they identified and organisational performance. For successful implementation, transferring decision-making authority to the quality circles by providing them with the information, expertise and resources is very important. If the circle depends on others to approve and implement their ideas, they tend to be less stable than more self-managed teams. 

Key benefits

The chief benefit of this approach is the good ideas that result in savings. The approach also improves communication, particularly upward, and raises the consciousness of employees concerning issues of quality and productivity. Employees are benefited from influencing change, improving their work lives, and from contributing to quality improvements. 

On the other hand, their daily work lives and job content increases, which fosters pride of workmanship. But for the continuation of their commitment, organisations must see ways and means of employee motivation. Apart from the mechanism for financial benefits to share cost benefit with members, non-financial benefits such as respect for their achievement, pride of workmanship and learning for enhancing their knowledge will contribute more towards committed culture.

Finally, participative culture can move towards trust culture where continuous improvement is instinctively created throughout the organisation. All employees participate in decision making; their contribution help to develop the organisation and the organisation contributes to their development in return. This culture built on trust continuously moves towards success. 

Shop floor employees in Sri Lanka have tremendous enthusiasm and knowledge to make a significant contribution to the growth of the country through the organisations they are working for. Utilising their unused intellect for the nation’s development is one of the major challenges of today’s leaders and quality circle can be considered as one of the most suitable tools for this. 

References:

Juran, J., ‘Juran on Planning for Quality,’ Free Press, New York, and Collier Macmillan, London, 1988

Edward E. Lawler III & Susan A. Mohrman, ‘Quality Circles After the Fad,’ Harvard Business Review, 1985 January

Gaikwad, Vishal V. & Anita V, ‘Quality Circle as an Effective Management Tool: A Case Study of Indira College of Engineering and Management Library,’ 2009.

[The writer, MBA (Sri. J.), is Editor of the Sri Lanka Association for Advancement of Quality and Productivity and visiting Lecturer in Management at the Human Resource Management Institute (HRMI) and the European Institute of Professional Studies, Sri Lanka (EIPL). He can be reached via [email protected] or [email protected].]