The policy says:
All SCG personnel shall be aware of and shall strive to comply with TI's Quality Policy:
We will achieve business excellence by:
Encouraging and expecting the creative involvement of every Tier.
Listening to our customers and meeting their needs.
Continuously improving our processes, products and services.
Pretty typical, I think, and it suffers from use of the passive voice. Instead of "...shall be aware..." why don't they have the confidence to say "All personnel
are aware..."? Likewise, why not drop the "will" from "We will achieve business excellence..."?
When will their personnel be aware, and
when will they achieve business excellence?
Uh huh. OK, I'll bite. My take on it is as follows. They have chosen to use the term business excellence instead of 'quality policy'. Absolutely fine by me - nothing compels anyone to use the exact same words of the Standard and the more a company writes it to make sense for them, the better as far as I'm concerned.
OK, so then they've said very clearly how they plan to achieve business excellence. By:
Encouraging and expecting the creative involvement of every Tier.
Listening to our customers and meeting their needs.
Continuously improving our processes, products and services.
And then they've included the requirement that all their people have to know it and strive to comply with it. OK, you don't like the strive bit and you want them to say they do it. A bit hair-splitting, surely?
My take on 'will' is that it recognises that they will always be striving to improve and never content to rest on their laurels. (And perhaps guarding against the occasional overly picky auditor who, faced with a policy that said all personal
are aware of something just might go looking for the 'gotcha' to find one who isn't... ').
They have said that all their people 'shall know' it. (Personally I'd prefer a policy that said '
must know' because I'm not fond of "shalls", but I don't run Texas Instruments).
As for 'suffering from passive voice'?? Where? If they'd written something like 'the quality policy shall be known by all personnel', I would agree with you. They haven't. They've used subject-verb-object construction.
Ultimately of course the real point is whether it works for
them and whether their customers are satisfied. Given that they've used it for 10 years, it suggests so.
Jim, I think that it's always possible to criticise the exact wording of someone else's policy. But at times it's possible to 'criticise something to death' which I think is a potential danger here. Yes, if I'd written it, I would have phrased it slightly differently, and you leave no room for doubt that you would too.
But it may not be terribly helpful: the person who posted it aimed to provide a reasonable example for the OP to help them understand.
If you don't like this one, why not point to one that you
do? As an example of a reasonably clear & short policy statement, I still think it's fine.
I came across one on a website for a diagnostic imaging company that read something like
“Company X will provide and support high quality diagnostic imaging products that deliver the best possible experience for our customers and their patients. Our quality objectives will be achieved using metrics and continual improvement techniques.”
I liked that one too. Because it's
short and it's
clear and I think that anyone working for them would have a reasonable chance of remembering and acting on it, which I think is one of the key points.
(Oh yes, they'll have to put in the formal stuff that they need, and presumably they had that in the doco too)
Reading back through your post, I find it very hard to believe that a consultant intended the posted text to be your Policy Statement.
