2 Tools to Improve Your Quality of Business (2024)

Welcome to episode 54 of Season 2 of Baktari MD! In this episode we talk all about how to improve your QUALITY of business! Whether its the product/service itself, or the internal workings of your company, everything you need to know about quality improvement is in this episode! All of the tips and tricks you need are right here! Find out all of this and more in the full episode! 

Transcript

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The other thing that you need to really put out there, which I think has been really helpful, is to disclose that anyone should be able to write a performance improvement report on anyone else, including the bosses, Hi. Welcome to another episode of Baktari MD. As you know, this season we are doing Crash CEO School, where we help you acquire all the skill sets you need to take your organization to the next level. Today I want to talk about quality and quality improvement, performance improvement and getting your organization to get to the next level. Obviously, the quality depends on a lot of things. It involves hiring the right people, the proper training, and just having processes and procedures in place that ensure that you put out a great product, great service, great quality. But on top of that, as time rolls by, how do you maintain quality? How do you find out where there's areas of weakness? How do you know what to work on? Which areas need improvement? So today in this video I'm going to go over two tools I would say that you can use in your organization to always stay on top of quality, on top of performance, to deliver better products, better services. So two things we're going to talk about. First thing I want to talk about is what happens when people make a natural errors. Or they make errors that they were unaware of in terms of what to do. I think traditionally what happens in those cases, people say, oh, we'll advise them that maybe that wasn't the way to handle the caller. We no longer have that product, and we should have not have said that, or he shouldn't have said that. But really, to keep it on a structural level, the important thing when these things happen is to figure out a way to document it for multiple reasons and then use that documentation to improve the organization. So in our organization, what we call those is performance improvement reports. Meaning when something goes not according to plan, when someone doesn't perform like they should have for whatever reason, sometimes lack of training. So sometimes they were unaware of a new policy, a new product. It's important to document that. And I'm going to go over why. One, first of all, the performance improvement is meant not as a write up or a disciplinary action, and that's the culture you need to send that if someone writes a performance improvement report is simply meant what the name says where we just want to improve performance. It's not the same thing as an incident report or employee write up, and really shouldn't be necessarily in the personnel file. It's really meant as a tool to get everyone better. And I think culturally that that's the message you need to send out before you implement performance improvement. Once everyone's aware that a performance improvement report is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's simply meant to bring some things to their attention. The other thing that you need to really put out there, which I think has been really helpful, is to disclose that anyone should be able to write a performance improvement report on anyone else, including the bosses, right? So if your boss makes a mistake and and handles something incorrectly or not, ideally, per the way the organization's supposed to be run it, there should be no blowback. If someone says, hey, you know, I'm going to write a performance improvement because I saw that document and this was left out, and this was left out because I think a lot of times people think if someone's my supervisor, oh, I maybe I'll mention it gently or something, but oh will. But I think if you we knew what the real purpose of performance improvement, which is to have even other people who didn't make that mistake learn from it. So what we do is we, write performance improvement, and anyone can write a performance improvement report on anyone else. And that performance improvement report goes to the person's supervisor. And that supervisor then sits down on a weekly or monthly basis and goes over them. And yes, they are filed away, but not necessarily in the person's, HR file. So it's not really meant to determine raises or demotions, what have you. Now, in all fairness, if it becomes excessive at a certain point, it's going to be obvious that we may have to intervene. Now, getting back to the point there, what's the point of all of this? The point of this is that think of performance improvement as mistakes, right? Just for for simplicity's sake, if a mistake happens right. The whole goal of even pointing it out because once the mistake happens, it's happened and it's either being repaired, fixed, whatever. So the goal of this performance improvement, not to put salt on the wound, embarrass anybody, but the one to make sure the person who made it doesn't make the same mistake. They have clarity on what the right thing was, but also then to take that information from that performance improvement report and look at it globally, and then come up with ways to make sure other people don't make the same mistake. And that's the second thing I'm going to talk about. But let's let's finish this and I'm then I'm going to teach you how to take that information from the performance improvement report and then help other people learn from those mistakes. Right. Without actually disclosing who made the mistake or why. So there's no reason to embarrass anyone or even insinuate something. But If you really want to see where the weakness in your organization is, then you take the last month, two months, six months of performance improvement report. You can look at it by department. You can look at by seniority, how junior they are if they're recently hired, if they've been there for a long time. And then you can come up with strategies to work on addressing them on a more global level. You know, one of the most common things I see is like, oh, you know, Bill accidentally sent the client the wrong form, so I talked to Bill and said, Bill, that was the wrong form. And three months later, Susie sends the wrong form for a similar client. Oh, I talked to Susie, and I and, you know, and I told her that was the wrong form. This whole idea of, like, going person to person, and one on one, letting them know that something was wrong really doesn't work in a big organization that's not very professional, it’s not very efficient. So at a certain point, if Bill and Susie are making the same mistake, even six months apart, the idea is we don't want another one six months later. So how how would we even know this occurred six months ago? How would we even know you know, there's been three of these in the past six months. If there isn't one central place where you have all this information so you can see the trends, you can see who is making, you can see because sometimes a mistake is a one off, like it'll never happen again. But sometimes, almost many times it will definitely happen again. You know, maybe new hires don't really know we have this products. And so people call say do you have this product. So they because it's a product that we seldom sell. So you now realize that this could be a problem with new hires or what have you. And how do you implement strategies and address this. So this doesn't become a recurring theme can only be only happen if you have some level of documentation, right? If you didn't document it, it didn't happen because I see in some organizations. Yeah, I think, you know, last year I think this happened too, with one of our salespeople that they gave a quote that was really wrong, because they didn't factor the extra work as this person's you know, in another state. So that's that's going to mean we're going to need to hire people in that state, whatever it is. The point is these performance improvement report help you in many, many ways. eNational Testing makes getting a simple laboratory test as easy as ordering something online. With three simple steps, you can have your test ordered for STDs, general health, allergy testing, diabetes screening, blood titers, and more! You can simply go in for testing the same day and get your results quickly to your email. eNationalTesting.com’s complete health care panels come with easy to understand results at over 2,700 locations nationwide. It's time to focus on yourself. eNationalTesting.com; easy, convenient and tailored to your health needs. And the second thing I want to talk about that I think these performance improvement can convert into is policy. Having a policy book and a policy manual. So what happens with these performance improvement reports once you see the trends, once you see, oh my gosh, you know, everybody in this department is making this mistake because I don't think they really have a handle on what marketing's doing. So then you may, you know, create a policy, but then you may have the marketing people come over, once a quarter and give an in-service to the salespeople, or vice versa. You can't come up with strategies like writing new policies. Okay. So every new hire set gets this policy, like, hey, when someone from out of state calls, you have to do this. Or when a client calls after hours and they want something on the weekend, this is what you're supposed to do. These policies have to be etched in stone. Often you hear people say, oh, I'm sorry you were given that information. they're not on the installation team. They're on the office. So let's say, you know, a couple of years ago, I was having a gate installed, and, so the guy comes in and installed the gate, and I say, wait a minute. Hold on a second. The people in the office said that, you know, the gates going to open this way or that way. And he goes, oh, those are the you know, those are the salespeople. They don't really know. But I'm here now. But you can see how lack of communication. So if policies and procedures were written where they didn't disclose information or deferred you to someone else or what have you, so the performance improvements then lead to policy, a policy manual. And the goal of that policy manual is to document some of these errors and and what the corrective action should be so they don't occur. And then you have every employee read the policy. We have them sign off on it every quarter where they read the policies and sign off that they've re-read them. Because the goal when it comes to quality and errors is to minimize them. But you have to have an active plan to minimize errors, and you have to have an active plan to minimize mistakes. And honestly, for people who don't do this, most of the mistakes that you see or you're exposed to when you're dealing with them, it's probably happened before, maybe a week ago, maybe a year ago, but it's happened before. You're not the only customer that was, you know, given the wrong info or this or that, and even when you pointed out to a company like, hey, I think this doesn't jive up with what I was told, like, well, I'll go back and I'll let that person know, but okay, that resolves the problem with that person. But what about in six months when another customer is calling the new hire of that person and they have the same thing? What's going to stop the perpetuation of sometimes honest mistakes? That unless someone really clarifies it and points it out, will probably happen again. And I think this is the whole point that some of these customer errors, quality errors, quality issues have happened before. They will happen again. And you can't simply talk to people every new person after it happens. So the action plan one is to have performance improvement report one so you can, in an objective way, communicate what went wrong with the person who made the error. And especially you can also see if that error has been occurred with them many times, and then use that data to come up with policies or strategies in your organization, which may involve in services or other things to make sure that there's heightened awareness of this potential error. And you can deliver, a product with less issues. Now, if all goes well, the amount of work you're going to put into this is going to translate to happier customers, a better product, better reputation, right? Because every time we make a mistake you know, people go online, write a review. People will tell their neighbors, people you will lose them as lifelong customers. And by the way, if these fatal occur, things occur with a corporate client and you lose a corporate account. That's not going to be any fun. So I think investing time in writing performance improvement report and then getting that data and, and coming up with an action plan, I remember the key to this plan, just to reiterate, anyone can write a performance improvement on anyone. So this is not just a management tool. This is a tool for everyone. Right? Because if we all are in the same ship and we want the quality to get better, who cares who made the mistake? Who cares who wrote the wrong information down? Who cares who conveyed the wrong information? Doesn't really matter. Could be the boss, could be the CEO, could be anybody. And if everybody understands when they get a performance improvement report, it's not a write up, it's not an incident report. It’s simply a tool to provide better quality. So you know what of what you can improve on. And if everybody views it that way, you know, in the right kind of organization, you should almost welcome it, right? Like bring it on. If I've done something that could be better, let me know. You share it with me. And if you can get your organization to the level where people are like, bring it on. Yeah, yeah, because I want to get better. I, you know, whether I'm the supervisor, the boss, whatever, I want to get better. And by the way, sometimes the bosses or supervisors, you know, normally don't get involved in the weeds. And so somehow they get involved and they say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing because that's not what they do all day. You should write a performance improvement report on your boss and a good way and just say, look, this is not how we normally do things. And I think what you did or said or what you put in that email, is not really what we can deliver. And so yeah, I just want to document that. So we're all aware and maybe other leaders in the organization need to hear this. So there is a way to do this. There is a way to improve quality. But if you don't have an active plan to improve quality and reduce errors, that eventually will translate down to your customers, both, you know, corporate and otherwise, and at a certain point, if it's rampant, if the culture of errors, and there's no consequences, there's no documentation, I think it will eventually will catch up with most organizations. Okay. So I hope that helps. Just a couple of strategies performance improvement reports, writing policies, and other strategies to act on those I think will help your organization really get to the next level. Okay. Well, thank you so much for watching. If you like this kind of content, please comment, like and subscribe and we will see you on the next video.