Employee Involvement, Talent Continuity & TQM

#employeeengagement #tqm #totalqualitymanagement #talent #employeeretention #employeedevelopment #totalqualitymanagement

Employee Involvement & Talent Continuity

A Perspective of Total Quality Management

Preface

In this series of articles, we delve into talent continuity and how it relates to organizational performance and competitiveness. In the first article (Link here) we defined what talent continuity is and provided an overview of the issues facing organizations in ensuring the same, along with the associated consequences. Moreover, we have highlighted talent management approaches that are being followed in leading companies, along with a brief summary of the literature reporting recommendations on the same. In this article, we elaborate on how employee involvement relates to talent continuity and the continuous pursuit for total quality management (TQM).

What is a TQM ?

TQM is commonly defined as an approach or philosophy that seeks to continuously improve quality in organizations processes, products, and services [1]. Overall, TQM is expected to increase productivity and lower costs, and the cumulative consequence is improvement of competitive position in the market; thus, pushing for the realization of typical companies’ objectives of profitability and continuous growth. To embrace TQM in organizational contexts and attain the aforementioned benefits, a set of six foundation principles are universally described [2], namely:

1) Management Commitment: Management to effectively participate and steer the continuous quality program with vision, support, and communication. 

2) Focus on Customers: Processes and products have to be customer-oriented, starting from internal customers to external ones.

3) Establish Performance Measures: Key organizational quantitative data to be effectively established and communicated to monitor the continuous quality improvement activity.

4) Continuous Improvement: All business and production processes shall be looked at, and studies and areas of potential improvement shall be prioritized and executed.

5) Treating Suppliers as Partners: A partnering relationship to be established with suppliers as both parties are impacted by the success or failure of the product or service.

6) Employee Involvement: TQM is an organizational effort. Employees should effectively participate and be involved in the continuous improvement process, as they understand the company and its processes better than anyone else.

How are TQM & Talent Continuity interrelated?

The above six concepts are critical for the effective implementation of TQM. Nevertheless, one could immediately postulate that organizations have to be equipped with adequate manpower to apply these extensive and broad principles, or in summary, organizations need to ensure a proportionally adequate level of talent; however, this has been industrially recognized as an uneasy feat [3-6]. Considering the same, many writings [3-7] attempt to explore why ensuring talent continuity has been challenging in the current age and in context of TQM. Firstly, companies are postulated to compete and attract talents with the same effort (or higher) they put into attracting and gaining customers, simply because the former is an indirect precursor to the latter via the relative attention directed towards the TQM principle of customer focus. This is resulting in a never-ending talent recruitment battle between organizations, which is typically characterized by extended recruitment cycles, continuous incentive enhancements, and, more importantly, an extended period of knowledge and experience instability. This phenomenon of talent turnover is considered by some to be unavoidable in the current age and context, as the agglomeration of companies in technology-based clusters with physical proximity instigates formal and informal relationships; thus, facilitating talent attraction and flow in addition to knowledge/experience leaks and spillovers [8]. Larger companies’ shortcut this slow yet steady process by getting involved in acquisition and merger deals with intent of expediting admission of critical talents, which is interrelated with ensuring trouble free and cost-effective access to highly developed, confidential and patented technologies that are necessarily required for up to date ensuring of TQM principles such as continuous improvement [9]. With respect to the quality aspects of talent, companies could be oversaturated with a particular category of talent against other essential talents, or it might have diverse but shallow talent portfolio due to insufficiency of personnel training and development programs, and failure in the aforementioned strive for talent attraction. For example, in technology organizations. the singularity of the skills portfolio is relevant, where extreme devotion to the latest technological trends and updates results in unintentional disregard of essential social and practical skills. Either way, this would lead to quantitative discontinuity of talent, as highly ambitious and leading talents will be departing due to their continuous strive for broader exposure and horizontal (i.e., between disciplines/fields) movements; thus, causing loss of managerial structure cohesion, abrupt disruption to established goals, consequently leading to limitations in ensuring the TQM principle of management commitment.

Employee Involvement: A Key for Successful TQM Implementation

In amidst the above challenges and their impacts on company performances, one of the TQM principles has been underlined as a potential solution to talent discontinuity; namely, employee involvement, which can be described by efficient utilization and empowerment of the available workforce to not only perform their mundane jobs, but also effectively participate in planning, development, and implementation of the abovementioned TQM concepts via feedback, innovative approaches, and established tools and techniques (e.g., ISO 9000, benchmarking). This is a broad field that could include anything from enhancing communication between employees to the participation of working level employees in decision making processes. A good example to cite is “Alphabet”, where talent continuity is imposed via passive employee involvement approaches; for example, by deliberately keeping a long waiting line at the canteen in prospect of pushing employees with different backgrounds to engage and share knowledge and experiences [10]. Toyota has also demonstrated how elaborate day-to-day employee involvement schemes could increase product quality and company competitiveness; specifically, it has given every employee the authorization and empowerment to stop the production line to address any deviation or issues once found, which explains their industry-established reliability and quality measures, in correspondence to TQM principles of “continuous improvement” and “performance measures”. Following this, we briefly elucidate how employee involvement relates to each of the remaining 5 TQM principles as displayed in Figure 1.

Employee Involvement – Focus on Customers

Employee involvement and engagement practices are found to entice a sense of psychological safety within an organization, which allows the employees to have ease of mind and be able to focus on other things that are fundamentally related to their business, such as customers [11]. Moreover, enhancing talent quality through employee involvement in knowledge and education processes has been correlated with better customer focused performance due to the anticipated improvement in their behavior in moments that require educated, professional, and organized responses [12].

Employee Involvement – Treating Suppliers as Partners

It is reasoned that before partnering with external organizations; there is a logical need to ensure the same within internal settings by embracing trust, including transparent working relationships, knowledge sharing, and effective communication [13]; which fall under the umbrella of employee involvement. Moreover, excellent relationships with suppliers help in enhancing talent quality by likely knowledge transfer, motivating employees to think in different ways to enhance processes and products, upon which any positive outcomes could push committed talents to continually look for untapped product and process improvement schemes by facilitating and sustaining an intimate relationship with the suppliers [14].

Employee Involvement – Continuous Improvement

Involvement of working level employees in decision making (bottom-up approach) has shown a positive correlation coefficient with continuous improvement efforts [15,16]. Also, there is a recent suggestion that employee involvement should mutually co-evolve with continuous improvement schemes since the infrastructure (e.g., training) supporting both needs to parallelly develop as the firm moves along the learning process [15]. Sound opinions claim that in the current fast-paced age, executives’ competitiveness is not enough to ensure improvements are recognized and executed promptly; rather, the whole organization body needs to be involved to deliver these improvements systematically via industry recognized tools and schemes [17].

Employee Involvement – Management Commitment

The impact of employee involvement on management commitment is attributed to the fact that opening the space for opinions and participation of employees in decision making entices a sense of commitment and responsibility, and the same is expected to cascade to management in realizing the outcomes that are sought by the employees [16,18,19]. At the same time, management commitment is reported to be the mediator between employee involvement and organizational performance [16]. A greater level of employee participation and commitment to organizational success can only be established with the support and dedication of top management [16,20]. Therefore, management commitment can be considered one of the precursors to employee involvement.

Employee Involvement – Performance Measures

Lastly, a positive relation between employee involvement and the performance orientations of organizations is expected, simply as involved and committed employees would take the effort to go the extra mile to understand customer needs, plan further product improvements, and make efforts to understand process concerns and limit them; thus, elevating the company's performance in the process [16, 21].

Conclusion

In conclusion, total quality management is a broad field that is highly dependent on industrial, economic, technical, managerial, and human resource factors. These factors are interrelated with the ability and willingness of employees to get effectively involved in continuous improvement processes that are essentially warranted in any total quality management agenda. Effective involvement of employees can be facilitated by ensuring employees are engaged in decision making, their skills are up-to-date with what is needed by the organizations, and by reducing critical staff turnover rates to other competing organizations. The realization of these points is not an easy feat as significant resources and intricate practices have to be employed; nevertheless, as studies show, the same is expected to eventually pay off in augmented innovation, performance, and competitiveness.

References

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