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Quality is Not an Action, It is A Habit

Guest post by: Kevin Kragenbrink

Article Overview: Small Business Owners, have you ever faced this situation? You develop or improve your systems for product or service delivery. Along with your new systems you establish quality standards and measures, and then you train your employees to make sure that everyone knows how to do what they need to do to get the job done to meet the new standards. You feel good about what you have put in place and so you go about looking at other areas to grow or improve only to find out later that the employees go right back to the old way of doing things as soon as they can. How frustrating is that?

Quality is Not an Action, It is A Habit

Small Business Owners, have you ever faced this situation? You develop or improve your systems for product or service delivery. Along with your new systems you establish quality standards and measures, and then you train your employees to make sure that everyone knows how to do what they need to do to get the job done to meet the new standards. You feel good about what you have put in place and so you go about looking at other areas to grow or improve only to find out later that the employees go right back to the old way of doing things as soon as they can. How frustrating is that? I have a client who faced this very situation recently. The business owner worked hard to create and define his system, trained his employees, made sure they understood everything they needed to do, and then turned them loose to get it done. It was not more than a day before the Owner noticed that the employees had gone right back to their old way of doing business. When he asked them about it, their response was, "we are just more comfortable with the old way."

What the employees were really saying is that they had developed habits in their work that made it much easier to stick to the old methods and much harder to adopt the new. Noted author Jack Canfield of "Chicken Soup for the Soul" fame, reminds us that up to 90 percent of our normal every day behavior is based on habits. If this is true, and I believe it is, then it has very important meaning for business owners. Think about this for a minute. Your employees, managers, even you, are creatures of habit. If we want to change our business, then, we need to change our habits. That is a hard thing to do.

Changing habit requires much more than just changing policies or systems. To change a habit you need to change what people do at the level of daily behaviors. You need to make them conscious of what they do and then give them tools and motivation to change that core activity.

Here's a tip: If you want to make a change permanent and lasting, make sure to develop a strategy that combines good systems with great monitoring and measuring at the behaviors level for as long as it takes to firmly establish the new habits.

Create a checklist that walks you or your employees through the steps of the process or system. Check regularly to ensure that the system is being followed. Know that your measurement of behaviors will need to be done more frequently in the early days of the change. As the habits develop over time, you will find you can measure less frequently without risking quality.

Finally: communicate, communicate, communicate! Tell your team why you are making the change, why you are measuring behaviors, what results you are hoping to see, and how you will know that the change has been fully accepted.

Remember, "if you always do what you've always done, you will always get what you've always got."

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Article Tags: behavior, change, habits, leadership, managing change, measures, quality standards, small business owners



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