Human Resources and Total Quality.
Human Resources and TQM
In previous lessons, we anticipated how personnel and management will affect the integration of benchmarking in TQM, or how the personnel might be against change. In fact, we were trying to state that without an appropriate human resources management (lets not forget that the centre of every action is client oriented - client focused; internal/external), TQM would fail in its attempt to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage or a constant improvement for the organization.
In this lesson, we will study how to integrate human resources management in TQM.
Constant improvement and human resources.
We will comment briefly on some common factors we will find in a TQM system related to the effort done by workers for constant improvement. They are:
Team work,
in a TQM environment, teams of workers (employees) share the responsibility for constant improvement. It is these teams who work to find new ideas and analyse questions related to performance and results. Moreover, they recommend solutions and, within their organization limits, apply them. The difference between quality circles and team work lies in the multidisciplinary will of the later.
Problem solving and delegation of responsibilities,
as we have seen in previous lessons, the organization system will determine quality improvement efforts in relationship with the workers who interact in it. The control tools we will study in later lessons can help workers identify problem causes and solutions. Workers can use these tools to determine if in fact there is a problem, and if there is one, that can be done to solve it.
Although control tools are clear and simple, applying them in a TQM system has many ramifications depending of the way in which work is managed. It is of extreme importance to provide workers with the necessary information, training and authority to carry out these analysis and apply their results. Normally, managers do not share information nor authority with employees in traditional enterprises.
The delegation of responsibilities also means training workers in problem solving for clients (internal/external) without having to go through slow approvals from their supervisors.
