CEB Quality Leadership Council

Build a Culture of Quality

Four Keys to Establishing an Environment Where
Employees Don’t Just Follow Quality, They Live It

Hear

Transfer

See Feel
Companies with a high culture of quality Executive Summary
have employees who make:
In most organizations, the Quality team has successfully established an
environment where employees understand quality is important and follow
46% Fewer Mistakes instructions set forth in quality management tools and standard work processes.
However, it is unrealistic to try to establish instructions and systems for all
75% Fewer “Significant” Mistakes scenarios where quality is important. A passion for quality must be intrinsic
75% F ewer Customer-Facing Product to every function and role.
Mistakes
Quality organizations now seek to create an environment where employees “live”
quality values in all of their actions, beyond what is directly outlined for them. In
a true culture of quality, employees not only follow quality guidelines but also see
others take quality-focused actions, hear others talk about quality, and feel quality
all around them—supported by cultural “carriers” who champion quality and rally
others to do the same.

In the 2013 Culture of Quality Benchmarking Survey, CEB set out to:
■■ Create a model for evaluating a culture of quality,
■■ Establish an index that quantifies the degree to which an organization has
a culture of quality,
■■ Quantify the business value of a culture of quality based on reductions in work
errors, and
■■ Identify the specific actions that create and support a culture of quality.

The research showed that—after foundation requirements of a Quality program

have been met—four focus areas are most influential in establishing a culture
of quality:
■■ Maintain consistent leadership emphasis and help leaders recognize where
their actions contradict stated quality policies and objectives.
■■ Ensure that quality messages are credible and relevant. For diverse
organizations that operate in multiple geographies, this means finding a way
to tailor messages without ceding control, and being globally consistent yet
locally relevant.
■■ Demonstrate peer prioritization of quality by generating a social climate
that encourages employees to support each other in generating quality ideas,
without this effort appearing to be pushed from the top down.
■■ Build employee ownership through targeted guidance, setting forth
enough guidance to give employees confidence to act, yet not so much that
independent decision making is stifled.
CEB research confirmed that investing in these four areas delivers real results.
Companies with a high culture of quality have employees who make 46% fewer
mistakes, 75% fewer “significant” mistakes, and 75% fewer customer-facing
product mistakes compared to companies with a low culture of quality. For the
average company—with 26,300 employees—this difference can lead to more than
$350 million in added employee productivity.

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 Contents

Walking a Tightrope Without a Net 4

From Following Quality to Living Quality 4

CEB’s Culture of Quality Benchmarking Study 5

Finding 1: A Culture of Quality Is Rare 6

Finding 2: The “See Quality” Component Is the Least Common 6

Finding 3: A Strong Culture of Quality Pays 7

Finding 4: Four Activities Differentiate a High Culture of Quality 8

Finding 5: Companies Tend to Underperform in All High-Impact

Categories 10

Building a Culture of Quality: Strategies in Action 11

Imperative 1: Maintain Consistent Leadership Emphasis 11

Imperative 2: Ensure Message Credibility 12

Where quality has a strong
presence in the culture, Imperative 3: Demonstrate Peer Prioritization of Quality 13
employees make far fewer
“significant” mistakes and fewer Imperative 4: Increase Employee Ownership Through
customer-facing mistakes. Targeted Guidance 14
This translates into very real
business value: For every 5,000 Summary 15
employees, improving culture
can save up to $67 million. About Ceb 16

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 Consumers are increasingly
conscious of product and
Walking a Tightrope Without a Net
service quality. They’re
more savvy and discriminatory by
Indisputable fact: Your customers are more empowered than ever. They can
product and price. This has forced
browse and choose from an endless array of options from around the globe. They
us to prioritize quality; otherwise
can compare your offering to the competition, read credible reviews and specious
we’ll get eaten alive.”
ones, buy or defect, praise, or lambast—all with a few clicks of a mouse.
Customers today have the world’s biggest purchase research tool and soapbox at
Vice President of Quality for a Food
and Beverage Company
their fingertips, and they don’t mind using it. Some 75% of business-to-business
customers say they use word of mouth, including social media, as an information
source during the purchase process. If that purchase process goes well for
them, great—but 26% of consumers say they have used social media to air their
grievances about a company and its products.
With the broadcast power of the Internet, quality issues are now more likely to
be exposed, and the exposure can cause widespread damage in minutes. That
means you have to earn customers’ loyalty with every interaction and product and
service experience. Quality has always been important, but now it has a whole new
meaning.
At the same time, quality is more at risk than ever, because most organizations
are under pressure to do more with less. Output continues to grow at a faster rate
than employment, a long-term trend that has only accelerated since the global
economic downturn.1 Technology fills some of this gap but to a lesser extent than
in the past. Technology drove 73% of productivity gains from 1995 to 2000 but
only 43% from 2000 to 2005.
All of these realities create the perfect environment for more errors as employees
find trade-offs to relieve the strain. The old adage, “Fast, cheap, quality; pick any
two,” still holds true in every industry.
How are your employees juggling those competing demands, and could it be
better?

From Following Quality to Living Quality

Traditional quality management approaches and tools have delivered a lot of
gains, and continue to do so, but more needs to be done. It would be tempting to
throw more technologies at the problem: more automation to further boost output
volume, more sampling to catch production errors, more text analysis of customer-
agent conversations and social media to monitor customer care and sentiment,
more reporting of quality metrics to spot emerging issues.
Technologies such as these are essential to any quality program, but it’s time
to take a fresh look at the core wellspring of quality: your people.
Quality executives already use various means to encourage employees to think
about quality and understand its importance. In most organizations, Quality
has been successful at establishing an environment where employees follow
instructions through tools such as a Quality Management System (QMS) and
standard work process design. However, as the scope of what constitutes a
“quality error” has expanded—in the eyes of both customers and the company—
more is needed.

1
Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Social Commercial Stats,” PowerReviews, Inc., 2012.

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 In a true culture of quality, A passion for quality must be intrinsic to every scenario and role, and it must
employees not only follow quality transcend guidelines and procedures that can address only known scenarios from
guidelines but also see others the past. As a result, Quality organizations are seeking to create an environment
take quality-focused actions, hear where employees “live” quality in all of their actions, beyond what is directly
others talk about quality, and feel outlined for them.
quality all around them—supported
by cultural “carriers” who What’s the difference between following quality and living quality? In the former,
champion quality and rally others quality is a stated and reinforced leadership priority handed down to employees.
to do the same. Employees understand that quality is important; they see it on the mission
statement in the lobby. They follow defined requirements for quality in their work.
However, since it is unrealistic to hope to establish instructions and systems for all
scenarios where quality is important, there’s a limit to the quality gains that can be
achieved. Anything not spelled out in rules and instructions is a potential source
of missteps.
Companies should evolve to a state where quality is embedded in the culture
and embraced by employees as a personal value, not just an edict. In a company
that lives quality, employees see quality as important to them personally. They
understand their role in quality, and they reflect this attitude in all their actions,
not just as specified in quality policies.
We interviewed heads of Quality from more than 60 multinational corporations
and conducted an extensive review of academic and practitioner sources to
determine what this “living quality” work environment looks like. In a true culture
of quality, employees not only follow quality guidelines but also see others take
quality-focused actions, hear others talk about quality, and feel quality all around
them. This culture is nurtured by cultural “carriers,” a core group of employees
who visibly prioritize and reinforce the quality environment while drawing more
advocates to become carriers themselves. Get all four of these elements right, and
the company is demonstrating a strong culture of quality.

CEB’s Culture of Quality Benchmarking

Study
The Culture of Quality Benchmarking What drives quality deep into the company culture? What can companies do to get
Survey pursued three ambitious there? To what extent does a culture of quality deliver real bottom-line results?
goals: measure culture of quality, Can the benefits be quantified? Those were questions CEB set out to address in
quantify its impact, and identify the 2013 Culture of Quality Benchmarking Survey. The goal of the research was
actions that drive it. CEB used threefold:
responses from more than 850
employees across levels of seniority,
Create a model for Quantify the business
functions, and industries to Identify actions that
understand the nature and drivers evaluating a culture of value of a culture of
drive a culture of quality
of quality in a company’s culture. quality. quality

What are the core elements Focus on a reportable Use regression analysis
that determine the strength outcome—mistakes in work— to isolate activities most
of a quality culture in the to calculate the cost a typical strongly associated with
organization? The model led CEB member company faces quality in the company
to a Culture of Quality Index, if it doesn’t have a strong culture.
a calculation that combines culture of quality.
respondent ratings on
the four identified core
elements: See Quality, Hear
Quality, Feel Quality, and
Transfer Quality.

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 The research started with an extensive review of academic and practitioner
literature on the subject, followed by a survey of more than 850 employees and
business leaders across functions, seniority levels, and geographies. Respondents
were asked to agree or disagree (on a 9-point scale) with declarative statements
such as, “People feel empowered to make decisions to ensure quality in their
work,” or “People feel comfortable raising concerns over a potential violation of
quality.” The survey addressed all the key elements of the Culture of Quality Index.
Researchers also recorded observations about the transfer of quality concepts and
attitudes in the subject organizations.
The findings were intriguing and suggest that there is much room for improvement.
The good news is that significant gains are very achievable when Quality
organizations focus on the right things.

Finding 1: A Culture of Quality Is Rare

Most employees work in an environment with a relatively weak culture of quality.
In fact, 60% of respondents are in an environment where the culture of quality
is less than half of its overall potential. This finding may be disheartening, but it
suggests substantial opportunity for improvement for the majority of companies,
which ought to be seen as very good news.

Figure 1: More Than Half of Respondents Work in Environments with a Low Culture of Quality
Combined Individual Culture of Quality Index Ratings

Quintile Category Average Culture of Quality Index Score

Top 20% 84.5%
Second 20% 61.7%
Third 20% 45.4%
Fourth 20% 32.3%
Bottom 20% 16.9%

Finding 2: The “See Quality” Component Is the Least

Common
Figure 2 shows the percentage of respondents reporting to “Agree” or “Strongly
Agree” for each element of the Culture of Quality Index. You can see that even
where the culture of quality is strong, employees are least likely to see their peers
focusing on quality. Environments with a high culture of quality are differentiated
by the extent to which employees transfer quality to peers.

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 Figure 2: Areas of High and Low Performance on Culture of Quality Index Core Elements

Culture of

Respondents Reporting Each as Higha

Bottom Fourth Third Second Top

Culture of Quality Index Element

Quality Index 20% 20% 20% 20% 20%
Ranking

Hear Quality 15% 31% 64% 86% 98%

Feel Quality 9% 25% 58% 87% 99%

See Quality 5% 7% 22% 45% 79%

Transfer
1% 1% 28% 90% 100%
Quality

n = 855.
a Percentage of respondents reporting Agree or Strongly Agree for each element.

Finding 3: A Strong Culture of Quality Pays

A $350 Million Opportunity Moving After we defined and measured the elements of a culture of quality, we wanted
from the bottom 20% to the top to know: Does it pay off? To quantify the benefits, we needed to find a common
20% in Culture of Quality Index currency across our membership. Given that errors in work are the result of poor
performance can lead to more than quality, we asked: Is there a difference in the number of mistakes employees make
$350 million in added employee
in strong versus weak cultures?
productivity.2
Not surprisingly, employees in the top-quintile culture of quality environments
have to address 46% fewer mistakes, 75% fewer customer-facing product mistakes,
and 75% fewer significant mistakes than those in the bottom quintile.
There’s a significant cost associated with those mistakes. For example, if an
employee addresses 7.2 mistakes per week—each resolution requiring two hours
at an employee cost of $42.55 per hour—a company with 26,300 employees (the
median for CEB membership) could spend nearly $774 million just to resolve
errors, many of them preventable. Improve quality to the point where employees
have to address only 5.3 mistakes per week, and the cost of suboptimal quality for
this hypothetical company drops to $569 million. Graduate into a top-quintile
quality performer where employees have to address only 3.9 mistakes per week,
and those costs drop to $419 million—a savings of more than $350 million a year.
The figures will vary by industry and company, of course, but a good benchmark
figure is that for every 5,000 employees in a company, moving from bottom
quintile to top quintile in Culture of Quality Index performance can result in
savings of $67 million.

2 Calculations reflect median reported time to resolve errors (two hours), median number
of employees for CEB Quality members (26,300), and median fully loaded employee cost
in CEB HR Practice panel ($88,500).

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 Figure 3: The Effect of a Culture of Quality on the Number of Mistakes Employees Must Address
Each Week

Overall Number of Number of Customer-Facing Number of Significant

Mistakes Addressed Product Mistakes Addressed Mistakes Addressed

7.50 7.20 ∆ = 46% 2.00 1.57 ∆ = 75% 1.50 1.04 ∆ = 75%

3.90
3.25 1.00 0.75

0.26
0.40

0.00 0.00 0.00

Bottom Top Bottom Top Bottom Top
Quintile Quintile Quintile Quintile Quintile Quintile
n = 855; statistically significant at 95% confidence level.

Finding 4: Four Activities Differentiate a High Culture

of Quality
Quality executives who can Through literature review and conversations with Quality executives, CEB
direct improvements in employee identified a list of actions that appeared to drive quality into company culture.
ownership, peer involvement, These actions were grouped into eight categories:
message credibility, and leadership
emphasis will drive quality deeper ■■ Best practice sharing. The company has systems for sharing best practices
into the company culture—leading and positive outcomes, as well as opportunities to analyze and learn from
to a possible 71% improvement in negative outcomes.
the Culture of Quality Index. ■■ Employee ownership. Employees understand their role in quality outcomes,
are empowered to make quality decisions, and feel comfortable challenging
quality directives or raising concerns about quality violation.
■■ Incentives. Employees receive monetary incentives for reaching individual
and group quality targets, as well as informal rewards for their focus on
quality.
■■ Leadership emphasis. Managers emphasize that quality is an important
leadership priority and walk the talk in supporting it.
■■ Message credibility. Messages about quality are delivered by respected
sources and are easy for employees to understand, appreciate, and apply.
■■ Peer involvement. Employees have a strong network of peers to support
and drive quality efforts, as well as being accountable for quality performance.
■■ Quality Management Systems. Quality expectations are outlined in a formal
QMS or similar resource, and quality performance is openly shared and
recognized.
■■ Tools and training. The organization has the tools it needs to evaluate and
manage work quality, and employees receive regular training to reinforce
the quality vision and practices.
We then tested the identified actions to gauge their influence on a culture of
quality. In addition to actions and investments Quality executives can make, we
also tested events and conditions Quality has less influence over but which could
also impact the culture, such as geography, company affinity, and employee
seniority.

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 Regression analysis revealed which components and activities had the most
significant influence in driving improvements on the Culture of Quality Index.
Companies with a strong culture of quality differentiate themselves through high
performance in four controllable categories of activity:
■■ Employee ownership. Instill a sense of individual ownership and
empowerment related to quality issues.
■■ Peer involvement. Create peer support networks to foster and encourage
a commitment to quality.
■■ Message credibility. Deliver authentic, understandable, and relevant
messages about quality.
■■ Leadership emphasis. Back these actions with genuine leadership support
for quality.
These are not the only factors that count, but—after the fundamental requirements
of a Quality program are met—these factors seem to be the most influential in
getting companies to the next level. High performance in these four areas together
has the potential to improve a company’s Culture of Quality Index by as much as
71%.
Common support mechanisms such as the QMS, best practice sharing, and tools
and training are useful for helping employees understand what to do, but they do
not do much to drive quality into the company culture. The message isn’t to stop
doing these things—these are necessary elements of the Quality program—but just
that they are not what will get employees to truly live, embrace, and proactively
support quality.

Figure 4: Culture of Quality Index Gains as a Result of Moving from 10th to 90th Percentile
Performance

Employee Ownership 26

Peer Involvement 25

Influenceable by Quality
Message Credibility 11

Executives
Leadership Emphasis 9

Quality Management System 0

Best Practice Sharing 0

Tools and Training 0

Incentives 0

Company Affinity 13
by Quality Executives
Less Influenceable

Catalyzing Event 14

Tenure at Company 4

Company Customer Focus 0

Employee Seniority 0

0 15 30

n = 855; R2 = 0.54; statistically significant at 95% confidence level.

Note: A
 nalysis also tested respondent geography and function, with no impact statistically
different from zero at the 95% confidence level.

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 Finding 5: Companies Tend to Underperform in All High-
Impact Categories
Companies are not doing as well Ironically, few employees report that their companies are effective at the activities
as they should on the categories most likely to drive quality into the culture. Respondents in our survey reported
that matter the most. Only 20% say particular weaknesses in supporting employee ownership of quality-focused
they are empowered to embrace actions and creating quality messages that are credible and relatable to them.
and act upon quality issues. Only Although leadership emphasis shows notably higher relative performance, nearly
10% feel the company’s messages one-half of respondents still report weak performance in that category as well.
about quality are credible.
These figures could reflect a lack of focus on these areas or perhaps the
fundamental challenges of changing human behaviors. Either way, the gap
between present and potential should be seen as the proverbial low-hanging fruit,
an obvious opportunity for improvement.

Figure 5: Companies Tend to Underperform in the Areas Most Important in Building

a Culture of Quality

Impact on Culture of Quality Indexa

Percent Improvement

26 25

11
9

Employee Peer Message Leadership

Ownership Involvement Credibility Emphasis

Respondents Agreeing Their

Company Executes Wellb
Percentage of Respondents

52

38

20
10

Employee Peer Message Leadership

Ownership Involvement Credibility Emphasis

n = 855.

a Percentage of improvement in Culture of Quality Index as a result of moving from 10th percentile
to 90th percentile performance.
b Percentage of respondents reporting Agree and Strongly Agree for drivers in each category.

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 Build a Culture of Quality: Strategies
in Action
By researching top-performing Quality organizations, CEB found four key
imperatives to building a strong culture of quality.

Seagate conducts culture Imperative 1: Maintain Consistent Leadership Emphasis

assessments to enable leaders
Seagate helps executives self-identify inconsistencies between their actions or
to see the mismatch between
their desired future state and decisions and the company’s ideal culture.
current behaviors. Workshops help Even when executives have the best intentions, there can be gaps between what
senior leaders identify their own they say and what they do. Employees then get mixed messages about whether
behavior mismatches and potential quality is truly important.
unintended consequences.
How can leadership identify the right behaviors to drive quality and then actually
model those behaviors in their day-to-day work? That was a question Quality
leaders asked at Seagate, a $14 billion provider of IT storage media, with a 42%
overall market share and the broadest product offering in its category. Company
leaders knew that their emphasis on quality could result in as much as a 9%
improvement in the company’s culture of quality, but there were still some
disconnects between vision and action.
Seagate now uses a progression of leadership engagement mechanisms to help
executives self-identify inconsistencies between their actions or decisions and the
company’s ideal culture. To start, the Quality team engaged with director-level
staff across functions through a series of quality improvement meetings:
■■ Shared behavior definitions. The Quality team hosted executive discussions
to jointly define desired behaviors for which leadership could be accountable.
This process started with discussions in quality process improvement
and transitioned to identifying and reviewing quality behaviors.
■■ Culture assessments. Quality and Human Resources teams compare
leadership’s assessments of the ideal Seagate culture with employee
assessments of the current state, which reveals any gaps in the current culture.
■■ Culture self-recognition workshops. Leaders attend workshops that drive
them to self-identify behaviors that might impede achievement of Seagate’s
desired culture: adaptability to a rapidly evolving world for sustainable future
success. Behavior simulations make the workshop messages tangible and
memorable.
What began as a quality culture initiative was quickly recognized as an
opportunity for company-wide cultural transformation. By showing leaders
quantifiable gaps between the expected and current states of their culture, Seagate
was able to build the awareness and buy-in needed for change.
“Executive participation has been the most important factor in driving culture
change,” said a senior director in learning and development. “Leadership
has shown enthusiasm and commitment that has trickled down through the
organization.”
Anecdotally, Seagate reports they have seen improvements in corporate-level
quality metrics and how they are addressing customer issues. Perhaps most
importantly, they have a established a shared context and vocabulary for what
they want to achieve—what they call “The Seagate Way”—which will serve as a
sustainable platform for continued cultural improvement.

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 Summary of Imperative 1: Maintain Consistent Leadership Emphasis
Help leaders understand how the disparity between their words and actions erodes
employee confidence that quality is actually a priority.
The right leadership emphasis can result in as much as a 9% improvement in a company’s
culture of quality. Unfortunately, leaders often don’t recognize when their actions and
decisions are inconsistent with the company’s desired culture. Help leaders understand
how the disparity between their words and actions erodes employee confidence that
quality is truly a priority.

Diageo’s quality engagement Imperative 2: Ensure Message Credibility

model enables more personal
appeal to employees but with Diageo customizes quality messages for local applications within globally defined
scale. Although certain aspects “guardrails.”
of Diageo’s quality approach CEB research shows that Quality executives are highly effective at aligning
stay centralized, decisions on messages with company priorities but much less so at ensuring employees find
implementation are made by site
those messages credible. Given the size and geographic scope of most CEB
leadership, using the engagement
model and guardrails for message member companies, Quality executives also have difficulty creating messages
implementation that appeal to all employees.
as a guide. That was certainly a concern at Diageo, the world’s leading premium drinks
business, with such notable brands as Johnnie Walker, Crown Royal, Jose Cuervo,
and Smirnoff. Diageo is a global company; its products are sold in more than 180
markets around the world. With such geographic diversity, executives faced a
trade-off between locally tailored quality messages—over which they had limited
control—and centralized messages that reduced relevance.
To strike the right balance—to be globally consistent yet locally relevant—Diageo
adapted concepts from the marketing world:
■■ Segmentation of the audience by meaningful attributes. Recognizing that
its 21,000 employees in distant geographies and different roles would have
varying needs and motivations, Quality identified a set of cultural “segments”
for sites to choose from. Site-level stakeholders identify the segment(s) their
site is most likely to embrace.
The four cultural segments (distilled from the original 800) are framed on
factors that motivate employees, so quality messages can be tailored to those
motivations. For example, if you’re personally motivated by wanting to reduce
cost and hassle, you’ll want to see data that shows how your efforts influence
those metrics. If you’re more motivated by customer or consumer feedback,
you’ll want to see customer satisfaction results.
■■ Targeted messaging appropriate to each segment. Quality has created
program implementation playbooks targeted for each segment. These
playbooks help management at the various sites customize quality culture
programs based on the segment(s) represented at their site. Playbooks help
maintain control over quality programs and eliminate the need to create new
approaches at every site.
By 2Q 2013, one-half of Diageo sites had developed quality engagement plans
without an aggressive global rollout, showing their eagerness for guidance on
customizing quality approaches. “Customizing quality approaches is really
helpful in giving quality more visibility,” said a site leader. “This is just what
we needed to engage more directly with our employee base.”

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 Summary of Imperative 2: Ensure the Credibility of Quality Messages
A credible quality message can result in as much as an 11% improvement in a company’s
culture of quality. Unfortunately, only 4% of employees report that quality messages at
their companies are highly credible.
Create cultural segments to enable scaled message customization. Quality executives
fear that customizing messages to local cultures will result in loss of control and dilution
of central initiatives. Develop a limited set of cultural segments based on universal
employee motivators to enable site leaders to customize messages and quality programs
within global guidelines.
Conduct regular “pulsing” on message relevance. Don’t assume that quality messages
stay relevant simply because quality is always important. Regularly test messages with
employees and adapt messages based on their feedback to ensure sustained relevance.

Imperative 3: Demonstrate Peer Prioritization of Quality

HGST showcases peer-generated quality ideas to create social incentives for a focus
on quality.
Creating authentic peer exchange is a balancing act. When leaders become too
involved in driving peer exchange, the impact and authenticity of that exchange
suffers. But you don’t want to do too little and potentially miss opportunities. The
ideal is to create opportunities for employees to see people like them prioritizing
quality, while at the same time preventing it from being seen as a top-down
initiative.
HGST, a Western Digital Company (formerly Hitachi Global Storage
Technologies), wanted to use peer networks to spark employee involvement
in quality improvements without over-engineering the effort from the top. By
bringing light to employee-driven quality projects, Quality creates some positive
social pressure to encourage employees to create their own quality initiatives.
This effort started with three approaches:
■■ Employee idea hallway displays. All employee-driven quality improvement
projects—not just the best ones—are showcased on progress boards in a well-
travelled hallway, a soft reminder that quality is something everybody around
them prioritizes and benefits from. HGST is also developing an intranet
database to share team-based improvement initiatives across its global
operations.
■■ Idea impact showcases. Quality and site leadership evaluate top projects
publicly to reward not just good ideas but also the right behaviors. They
do this using both standard criteria such as business impact as well as softer
criteria, such as participant enthusiasm.
■■ Collective participation incentives. Quality drives employees to focus on
quality through friendly quality competitions that capitalize on collective
pride, not simply financial rewards, to spark continued generation of quality
improvement ideas.

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 HGST has experienced year-over-year increases in the number of ideas generated
and has extended this model to a number of countries. In addition to small group
activities at the operator level, HGST applies a similar methodology to larger-scale
operational excellence projects, including its white collar and engineering work
forces.
“When I first joined the company, I was skeptical of this whole thing,” said a
quality and customer support executive. “But I’ve developed a real sense of
amazement; there’s a real sense of pride in work that people have developed as a
result of this.”

Summary of Imperative 3: Demonstrate Peer Prioritization

of Quality
Widespread peer involvement in quality activity can result in as much as a 25%
improvement in a company’s culture of quality. Minimize Quality’s involvement in peer
exchange to maintain its authenticity while still ensuring that these exchanges take place.
Make quality activity visible to all employees. Employees are often unaware of how
much their peers are prioritizing quality. Don’t simply show best practices and “winning”
ideas to demonstrate employee quality initiative. Publicize and celebrate employees’
quality activities as they are in progress.

Imperative 4: Increase Employee Ownership Through

Targeted Guidance
Wrigley, a subsidiary of Mars, Incorporated, provides the right level of guidance
to support confident and independent decision making.
Employees often reach a point where concerns about making the wrong decisions
constrain them from independently applying more judgment. This hesitation
leaves a gap that Quality executives must address to ensure employees “live”
quality. But to what degree should they offer guidance?
With insufficient guidance, employees are unclear about their authority to make
decisions and act. Too much guidance stifles creativity and discretionary action.
The right level of guidance gets employees thinking about their responsibilities
and what improvements they can make.
Quality leaders at Wrigley, a recognized leader in confections, wanted to make
sure quality excellence behaviors are fully understood and applied consistently
across all functional areas, and not just the responsibility of the quality or
manufacturing organizations. Wrigley took two primary approaches to achieve
this:
■■ “Quality in Action” guidelines. Quality at Wrigley creates additional
guidelines to help clarify quality expectations for associates. Guidelines
are written only for areas that are critical to quality improvement—and
are screened for clarity and flexibility. Some guidelines are universal and
others are function-specific to help associates understand their base quality
responsibilities.
■■ Quality action observations. Quality creates opportunities for associates
to easily observe and recognize quality actions beyond the guidelines and
promote an associate-led focus on quality and food safety. These observations
form the basis of group brainstorming sessions that determine root cause
and identify corrective actions—focusing on barriers rather than individual
parties.

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 Wrigley’s “Quality in Action” guidelines have prompted associates to become
more engaged in identifying quality actions beyond the guidelines in their work
environments. “Our peer-to-peer recognition system will impact approximately
13,000 of our associates worldwide, truly establishing a bottom-up approach to
creating a culture of quality at Wrigley,” said a global quality executive. After
seeing the results of Wrigley’s Quality Excellence Behaviors and peer-to-peer
recognition system, Mars has decided to initiate the same programs company-
wide.

Summary of Imperative 4: Increase Employee Ownership Through

Targeted Guidance
Employee ownership of quality actions can result in as much as a 26% improvement in a
company’s culture of quality. Although they don’t need explicit instruction, employees do
require initial guidance to start them down the right path of quality focus.
Create a limited set of policy guidelines to stimulate employee creativity. Employees
often don’t know where to start when taking ownership of quality. Give employees
guidance that is not so broad they can’t translate it into action or so narrow that it stifles
independent action.
Develop quality “evangelists” who convert employee awareness into action.
Employees need clarity on how quality personally affects them and what they can do
about it. Use provocative messaging to entice them to ask questions about quality. Train
quality teams to influence others and overcome objections, so they can convert interested
employees into committed quality ambassadors.

Summary
“Living” quality requires that quality have a strong presence in the company
culture. Living quality requires employees to apply skills and make decisions in
Hear areas of greater ambiguity, which could raise their concerns about the risks and
payoff. Quality must be driven into an employee’s values and beliefs to create the
will to independently execute quality at a high level.
transfer
You can measure your culture of quality by assessing four factors. In a true culture
See feel of quality, employees hear, feel, and see quality all around them. These values are
nurtured and reinforced by a core set of cultural “carriers” who visibly prioritize
quality and rally others to do the same.
Quality executives should focus investments on the four areas that are proven
to support these four factors and build this culture of quality in the organization:
A culture of quality is an ■■ Maintain consistent leadership emphasis. Leaders often don’t recognize that
environment where employees their actions can contradict stated quality policies and objectives. Help leaders
hear, feel, and see quality all
understand their “say-do” gaps to maintain employee confidence that quality
around them. These values
are propagated by cultural
is a priority. Getting it right can deliver as much as a 9% improvement in a
“carriers” who visibly prioritize company’s culture of quality.
and bring focus to quality. ■■ Ensure quality message credibility. Don’t assume that your messages stay
relevant simply because quality is always important. Develop scalable cultural
segments to tailor messages without ceding control, and regularly test
messages with employees to ensure they remain relevant. Getting it right can
result in as much as an 11% improvement in a company’s culture of quality.

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 ■■ Demonstrate peer prioritization of quality. Reduce Quality’s involvement
in peer exchange to maintain its authenticity, while still ensuring that those
exchanges take place. Widespread peer involvement in quality activity can
improve the company’s culture of quality as much as 25%.
■■ Build employee ownership through targeted guidance. Although they don’t
need explicit instruction, employees do require initial guidance to start them
down the right path of quality focus. Employee ownership of quality actions
can result in as much as a 26% improvement.
The effort is worth it. A strong culture of quality leads to fewer mistakes.
Companies with a high culture of quality have employees who make 46% fewer
mistakes, 75% fewer significant mistakes, and 75% fewer customer-facing product
mistakes compared to companies with a low culture of quality. For the average
CEB member, this difference can lead to more than $350 million in added
employee productivity.
CEB offers members the CEB-exclusive “Culture of Quality Maturity Model”—
a comprehensive, research-backed framework for understanding the most
important dimensions of a culture of quality, how those dimensions change
as the organization evolves through four stages of maturity, and how Quality
organizations can shape that positive change.
To find out more contact Quality.Support@executiveboard.com.

About CEB
Founded in 1983, CEB provides authoritative data and tools, best practice research, and
peer insight to senior executives. The company’s 10,000+ member organizations in 110+
countries include more than 70% of the FORTUNE 1000, 80% of the FTSE 100, and 62%
of the Dow Jones Asian Titans 50.
Through this network, more than 300,000 business professionals have access to more than
300,000 corporate best practices, 1,500 benchmarking data sets, and 11,500 analytical tools
to drive faster, more effective decision making across all major disciplines and areas of
business.

For more information: +1-866-913-8102

Quality.Support@executiveboard.com
www.cebglobal.com

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