The importance of quality management in business – BusinessBasics

Growing businesses face a range of challenges every single day. There is the existing stress of running a business, alongside the growing pains of hiring, onboarding and training a new employee. This process of growing is tough, but it isn’t impossible.

A solid foundation to lay before you begin actively growing the business is implementing a quality management system. This system has several benefits for businesses of all sizes and will help set your business up for success (and scalability) in the future.

Imagine waking up, getting ready and going to work, knowing exactly what you need to do the moment you walk in the door. Better yet, you know exactly how to do what you need to do.

This concept is foreign to many business owners.

Quality management systems put a spotlight on developing these processes – this is what sets the standard of quality in the business and sets clear criteria of what is to be done to achieve results.

This is much bigger than just doing actual work as well. Imagine there is a set process for literally every aspect of your business – from the hiring process to completing work, right through to managing customer service and risk management. There is no limit to how many processes your management system requires – as long as they help the business achieve big-picture goals.

Some benefits of creating processes include:

• Reducing human error
• Reducing risks
• Increasing efficiency
• Creating consistent outputs
• Reduce training time of new staff
• Easily upskill existing staff

At the end of the day, a growing business who has clear processes for their work and communication can expect the growing process to follow a much smoother procedure than one with no processes.

A growing business is a busy business. This is a fantastic result of all your hard work and efforts in improving the business and expanding the client base, but it’s not without its growing pains. Once your business has processes implemented, your new staff can easily jump on board and get up to speed in a shorter period of time. Combine this with criteria outlining what is and what isn’t a quality product and your business will see a continual flow of high-quality products and services, allowing you and your management team to focus on business building efforts.

Your employees will also be grateful – there is nothing worse than being told to do a job you have no idea how to do. With clear standards and processes in place, a business can expect to see an increase in productivity efforts and quality outputs.

It’s critical to mention here that management must also support the employees throughout their work – just because there are processes and standards in place doesn’t mean all stresses melt away. A growing business needs to support its existing employees to reduce turnover of staff and promote a healthy workplace.

Read our blog on increasing productivity with a mentally healthy workplace.

Meet & exceed customer expectations

One of the key benefits of implementing a quality management system is your business has a clear customer service system and process so your team can ensure your customers are thrilled with the work being produced.

A growing business needs happy customers to spread the word of your amazing product and service – and you can’t risk having unhappy customers. Did you know happy customers tell 9 people they’re happy with the product and service, but one unhappy customer tells 16?

And what’s worse is you can’t contact those 16 others to explain the context of the unhappy customer.

With a quality management system, your business has the systems and procedures in place to win new customers, keep existing customers happy, and effectively communicate and manage potentially unhappy customers. It can seem like a daunting process to set up, but a growing business needs to invest time and resources into developing these procedures to ensure a smooth process as they scale up.

BusinessBasics offer policy and procedure development services, as well as management consulting services, to help growing businesses succeed. Contact our team today for more information on how we can help you implement a quality management system.

BusinessBasics helps Australian businesses grow with quality management systems.