Quality Tool box talks

Falcon419

Starting to get Involved
Does anyone have ideas or examples of weekly tool box talks on quality? We do a weekly Safety tool box talk but would like to implement a quality one as well.
 

John Broomfield

Leader
Super Moderator
Does anyone have ideas or examples of weekly tool box talks on quality? We do a weekly Safety tool box talk but would like to implement a quality one as well.

Falcon,

I’ve not heard of toolbox meetings to address quality issues.

I’m guessing that you want these weekly toolbox meetings to share knowledge of process, service and product quality issues and to deepen awareness of quality generally.

In the 1980’s organizations formed quality circles for much the same purpose but they’ve now died-off as leaders and managers changed their leadership style to engage employees daily in improvement and in preventing and solving problems.

This change coincided with leaders and managers understanding management system standards and using their conforming management systems to engage employees in assuring safety and quality while also preventing pollution.

Why continue with Safety Toolbox Meetings? Are these meetings making up for a lack of daily or hourly participatory leadership?

John
 

Mike S.

Happy to be Alive
Trusted Information Resource
First, I see no problem with doing a weekly safety or quality "toolbox talk" or lesson or quality circle or whatever you wanna call it. IMO, the number of "leaders and managers" who have actually changed their leadership style to engage employees daily in improvement and in preventing and solving problems is much less than it should be in the real world. Lots of them say they do this, but I believe the number who actually do it on an ongoing basis is low.

If you have such leaders and managers, great, but that doesn't preclude perhaps doing a deeper dive on a weekly or monthly basis. IMO you'd be hard pressed to find companies who do too much training or educating of their workforce.

As far as subjects, try to make the subject matter relevant to recent goings-on, maybe ask for ideas from the "students". A review of the basic 7 quality tools would often be helpful. Maybe discuss some of the articles past and present that appear in the quality or trade magazines or from recognized experts like Juran, Deming, Wheeler, Balestracci, Crosby, and others. Maybe discuss a section of the standard(s) that you operate under. There are hundreds of subjects to choose from.
 

Falcon419

Starting to get Involved
:thanks: for your advice, I will certainly check out those routes for ideas and topics.
Current plan is to conduct them on our procedures and why they are important and how they conform to our ISO standards. Example ESD, Document Control, NCR process, Calibration, 5S.....
Looking for feedback from other quality folks on topics or examples of their quality talks or cooler talks they may share with their employees.
 

John Broomfield

Leader
Super Moderator
Hopefully compensating for poor leadership with the toolbox meetings will not delay corrective action to change the behaviors of leaders, managers and supervisors.
 

nvquality

Starting to get Involved
I know of a large healthcare company that would do brown bag lunches/meetings and cover things like auditing techniques, standards, and quality tools. I would think topics would be organization and industry-dependent to a degree. For instance, in the medical device industry, you could review FDA warning letters that similar companies have received and how the observations relate to your processes. So there might be something similar for your industry.
 

Mike S.

Happy to be Alive
Trusted Information Resource
Hopefully compensating for poor leadership with the toolbox meetings will not delay corrective action to change the behaviors of leaders, managers and supervisors.

Warning: rant ahead!

In an ideal world, no, it wouldn't. But, respectfully, in an ideal world, we wouldn't have the poor leadership in the first place, would we? In the real world where many of us toil every day, for many of us reality is not ideal, by a long shot.

Whether you look at anecdotal reports from friends, relatives, acquaintances, or posters here at the Cove, or more formal analysis from various authors or organizations like Gallup, we find lots of examples of poor leadership and/or room for improvement. Lots of cases where "leaders" have NOT "changed their leadership style to engage employees daily in improvement and in preventing and solving problems."

A 2017 Gallup report says the following:

The American workforce has more than 100 million full-time employees.
One-third of those employees are what Gallup calls engaged at work. They
love their jobs and make their organization and America better every day.
At the other end, 16% of employees are actively disengaged — they are
miserable in the workplace and destroy what the most engaged employees
build. The remaining 51% of employees are not engaged — they’re just there.

Employees have little belief in their company’s leadership. We have found that just:
•• 22% of employees strongly agree the leadership of their organization
has a clear direction for the organization.
•• 15% of employees strongly agree the leadership of their organization
makes them enthusiastic about the future.
•• 13% of employees strongly agree the leadership of their organization
communicates effectively with the rest of the organization.


I believe many, if not most, quality practitioners have little actual leverage or success in making these leaders “change the behaviors” that need changing. Sure, they try their best, but showing the leader the water and getting them to drink it are two different things. Try issuing a CAR to senior leadership telling them they have developed a company with a poor culture that needs fixed, or that they need to “engage employees daily in improvement and in preventing and solving problems” and see where it gets ya.

My point is, sometimes in the real world all we can do is the best we can do, and sometimes that means we take what authority we have, or a little more if we’re feeling frisky, and try to lead by example and influence the people that we can in the best way we can.

Maybe that means that only within our direct sphere of influence (team, shift, department, etc.) we engage employees daily in improvement and in preventing and solving problems, and do some “toolbox talks” to dive deeper, and maybe if we do it at lunchtime (lest we get yelled at for taking the others away from their “real work”) we can get some folks from other departments or areas to join our toolbox talks and hope the cure spreads virally. Maybe eventually we’ll get lucky and some of the leaders may even “catch the cure”.

I've been in this boat. I've pushed as hard as I dared without being insubordinate or losing my job. I’ve done what I could, when I could, and eventually at least some of the leadership that resisted my efforts, including one who referred to my efforts as “the college-boy wasting time” or something along those lines, eventually saw some good in it and at least stopped actively opposing me. And one glorious day the President even came in to one of my sessions, sat down, and said “keep going, I just wanted to watch” and later encouraged me to continue. (The employees loved it, BTW.)

Did I make the amount of change I wanted to? Did we as a company reach our potential? No, but I did leave that place much better than I found it before I moved on. Sometimes that is all we can do.
 

John Broomfield

Leader
Super Moderator
Neither of us suggest that we should live with the consequences of poor leadership.

As QPs we help top management to engage employees and may use that Gallup Poll to design our company’s own questionnaire.

We bring such system weaknesses to the attention of top management when we’re ready to advise them what to do.

Or we may choose to live with a repair while look for another opportunity elsewhere.

Such is the price of poor leadership.
 
K

Keith Childers

Back when I used to work for a Tier 1 who supplied GM we had to do a daily "Fast Response Board" meeting in order to comply with what was then the QSB (now BIQS) requirements.

I don't have access to the presentations anymore, but it sounds like this is similar to the Quality Toolbox talks that you are looking to implement.

GM makes the information readily available on their supplier portal, so maybe someone who currently supplies GM could help.
 
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