Quality Policy awareness records

[Gialandon]

My business has recently updated their Quality Policy and I need to plan the roll out. This is huge, impacting multiple manufacturing sites & multiple sales sites.

ISO states the policy must be communicated & understood. I need to have records for compliance purposes but want to minimize the work required. What is the minimum expectation from an auditor point of view in terms of having records to show that the policy has been communicated & understood? is email acknowledgment ok? or a record that the employee have read and signed?

We will be having some smaller video's, and talks delivered by our VP of Quality to get the message across but we don't want this to become a sign off session or record keeping session. I'd rather have staff focus on the content & manage compliance requirements easily offline.

Thanks.

 

[Randy]

How in the world do you intend to verify & validate understanding? You can communicate until your face turns blue and your fanny falls off but you can't "mandate, force feed, or inject understanding". Understanding is something that can't actually be quantified the best one can do is ask "what does it mean to you?" or "how does it effect you?" Understanding and awareness isn't reciting back or reading from a goofy card (like I had shown to me 10 times this week alone). Part of what I do is look at complaints, nonconforming product, internal audit results, customer satisfaction, achievement of objectives and a ton of other things as part of my evidence of awareness and understanding.

Shoot, I "understand and am aware" of your policy right now and I've never seen it and probably never will....."We're going to do good stuff all the time, do our best to make our customers happy, fix what's broke, cross our goal lines and do our best to do things better."

Pretty close?

 

[Tidge]

What is the minimum expectation from an auditor point of view in terms of having records to show that the policy has been communicated & understood?

SCENE: Manufacturing floor. AUDITOR is accompanied by PLANT MANAGER who is guiding a tour. the tour group approaches a work station with an ASSEMBLER.

AUDITOR (to assembler): Hello, Do you know what the Quality Policy is?

 

[Jake with the Calipers]

We are a single site operation but on top of reviewing the quality policy briefly at each quarterly company meeting where employees sign off on attendance we have a large poster above the quality control room that displays our quality policy. The quality policy is also covered during new employee orientation for what that's worth too, may not help you in this exact scenario but perhaps going forward.

That way, with the large poster, an employee doesn't need to know the quality policy verbatim but does know exactly where they can find it for their own reference or if an auditor decided they wanted to ask about it they could point right at the wall and say "right there, boss". Perhaps just having the quality policy on obvious display at your sites would be a good idea and minimize additional resources in rolling it out.

 

[ScottK]

Auditor questions about the quality policy are open book quizzes. Have the QP in easily accessible locations so anyone can point at it and read it as they need... the training then is about how one's job supports that policy, not about the contents of the QP.

In my current company we have poster size QPs in strategic places and every employee has a business card size copy of the QP to keep with their work badge. When we rolled it out we focused on giving examples how various jobs support the QP. Yes - once a year we do a refresher and document that everyone under the scope of the registration was at that refresher so that's the record. As far as verifying understanding, we cover that during internal audits by asking a sample of people in the areas being audited how they support it. If there are problems we'd issue a finding, but we haven't had to do that yet.

 

[Tidge]

In my current company we have poster size QPs in strategic places and every employee has a business card size copy of the QP to keep with their work badge. When we rolled it out we focused on giving examples how various jobs support the QP. Yes - once a year we do a refresher and document that everyone under the scope of the registration was at that refresher so that's the record. As far as verifying understanding, we cover that during internal audits by asking a sample of people in the areas being audited how they support it. If there are problems we'd issue a finding, but we haven't had to do that yet.

I spent some time supporting a single company with mutliple sites; all employees had a card-sized copy of the Quality Policy in our lanyard-worn IDs. There were also posters up.

One (miserable, always-in-quality-trouble) site held an annual dog-and-pony show about the QP, another (smooth running, never-in-trouble) site simply had the QP questions (what is it?, where can you find it?, how do you support it?) come up as part of every internal audit. For that smooth-running site, it was very casual and everything was copacetic. For the other site, we'd occasionally have meltdowns in front of 3rd parties specifically about the QP, partially because that site was far more concerned about the appearance of quality than they were about "doing good stuff all the time."

 

[John Predmore]

What is the minimum expectation from an auditor point of view

5.2.2.b requires the Quality Policy be "communicated, understood, and applied" within the organization.

In addition to reciting the Quality Policy or explaining its meaning in his own words, an employee could be asked "Tell me one way your actions in your workplace put the company Quality Policy into actual practice."

At an all-employee meeting prior to an external audit, I coach employees to consider how they might answer this question. Sample responses from a plant-floor operator might be:
'I am careful to follow my work procedures so that good quality product is produced'.
'If I have questions regarding product quality or the proper procedure, I generally ask my [supervisor/team lead].'

An office worker might use the answer:
'I strive to give realistic estimates when a report will be completed, and I do my best to stick to it.'
'I often ask a co-worker to proof-read my customer communications before sending them out, in order to correct any errors, and improve message wording, so to enhance customer satisfaction with our company.'

As with any statement made to an auditor, avoid absolutes, such as "I always..." or "we never...". If an employee says something is 'always true' and the auditor finds one example where it is not true, you are inviting more intense scrutiny. Better to use qualifying words such as "I try..." or "Generally..."

 

[Sidney Vianna]

This is one of the most inane and misapplied requirements of the standard. The PERFECT time and place to ask anyone (especially the higher ups) about the quality policy is when you uncovered situations such as:

1) Someone with authority releasing nonconforming products to the customer to make quotas.

2) A salesperson deliberately lying to a customer about delivery dates, product performance, pricing, etc.

3) Refusal to address a customer complaint just because they represent only 0.002% of your business volume.

4) etc ad nauseum.

The intent of the policy requirement is to basically inform the whole workforce that the organization is committed to satisfy customers as a business strategy. The way the standard is phrased and how organizations attempt to comply with it is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, silly and non value added.

 

[Michael_M]

Slightly off topic: I have always hated the Quality Policy (ISO 9001 and AS9100). I find it a meaningless word salad that, non-managers, don't care about except during the audit. Early on in my quality career, I got a corrective action because the auditor asked every single employee (20ish or so) what the quality policy was and one person could/would not answer (note this same employee also initiated another CA for not doing maintenance on the machine). The next year, we got a major because, again, 1 (different) employee could/would not answer the questions (we had put the QP on business cards and posted it on EVERY wall, machine, surface, space.

At my current place, there is a 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper everywhere with the QP on it in 72 point font.

 

[Golfman25]

How in the world do you intend to verify & validate understanding? You can communicate until your face turns blue and your fanny falls off but you can't "mandate, force feed, or inject understanding". Understanding is something that can't actually be quantified the best one can do is ask "what does it mean to you?" or "how does it effect you?" Understanding and awareness isn't reciting back or reading from a goofy card (like I had shown to me 10 times this week alone). Part of what I do is look at complaints, nonconforming product, internal audit results, customer satisfaction, achievement of objectives and a ton of other things as part of my evidence of awareness and understanding.

Shoot, I "understand and am aware" of your policy right now and I've never seen it and probably never will....."We're going to do good stuff all the time, do our best to make our customers happy, fix what's broke, cross our goal lines and do our best to do things better."

Pretty close?

Agree 100%. But here we are with a dozen or so responses which basically amount to "it's on the wall" "blah, blah, blah." So why is the stupid requirement even in the standard?