Creating a Quality Policy that Sticks

By Chuck Gault, Max Coating President

When was the last time you read a quality policy and walked away remembering what it said? Probably never. They’re usually so long and packed with fancy words that not even the employees can recall it off the top of their heads. But what’s the point in having a policy that no one remembers?

That’s exactly why we came up with the diagram above, the three legs of the quality policy stool. This visual representation completely changes the game. It makes our quality policy so powerful and so easy to remember. A visual representation just makes it click.

A few years ago during a customer audit, several of our team members on the floor were asked “what is Max Coating’s quality policy?”  If they got any part of it right, that was considered good. Now we have the quality policy diagram posted in the plant. We can ask the same question today and we get a much better response. Most everyone has some idea of what our quality policy is and some can describe it in surprising detail. Our audit scores may go up, but the main thing is for our folks to actually understand our policies and be able to implement them.

In closing I’ll offer this: My son tells me he is a visual learner. I guess he was taught that at school.  I actually think we ALL must be visual learners, or at least all of us can benefit from visual cues.  I haven’t met anybody who didn’t appear to be helped by a picture or diagram.  That’s one powerful idea:  You take a complicated, wordy statement and develop a picture that tells the story visually. Give it a try yourself and see if you get the results we did.

Max Coating is a leader in the metal finishing industry and provides electrocoating and powder coating services for automotive, industrial and agricultural manufacturers. Learn more at www.maxcoating.com.