1. Introduction: the definition of quality and the change of quality management concept.
The quality of work is the most important criterion to judge the effectiveness of all work in meteorological industry; However, the first thing we need to be clear about is: what is "quality", what is its internal meaning, and what enlightenment it has on our work.
The Contemporary Definition of (1) Quality
Many world-renowned quality experts have defined quality from different angles. Comparatively speaking, Dorian Xie Ning, an expert in statistical engineering management, has widely spread the definition of quality in the world:
"Quality is the satisfaction, enthusiasm and loyalty of customers. Quality is customer enthusiasm. "William. Edwards.Deming, a world-famous quality management master, defined quality as: "Quality is something that is enhanced to products from the customer's point of view. From the customer's point of view, quality is anything to improve the quality of products. )"
Japanese quality management scholar Dr. Genichi Taguchi has a similar definition of quality, which is widely used by the world business community: "Quality is felt by customers, and customers are the most important part of the production line."
Limited by space, it is not convenient to explain in detail and discuss in depth the internal meaning of these definitions here; But these definitions at least reveal the fact that customers are the most important part of the production system (business system); The quality of products is determined by customers. Generally speaking, with the passage of time, the changes of times, environment and objects will lead to the changes of customers' requirements for products, so the quality standard of products is not a set of static numbers, but changes with the passage of time.
(2) Changes in quality management methods and concepts.
Historically, according to methods and concepts, quality management has roughly gone through three stages:
The first stage is the quality inspection stage; Produced and prevailed in the 1920s and before. This method mainly ensures that the products produced
The second stage is the statistical quality control stage; Produced in the mid-1920s. Its characteristic is to use the principle of mathematical statistics to control the quality between production processes, so as to prevent a large number of unqualified products. Its concept is "quality makes".
The third stage is the total quality management stage. In 1950s, with the rapid development of productive forces and science and technology, people's attention to product quality shifted from the general performance to the durability, reliability, safety, maintainability and economy of products. In production technology and enterprise management, it is required to study quality problems from a systematic point of view. Management theory also has new development, emphasizing human factors and relying on the efforts of all employees to ensure quality. In this case, the quality general manager of General Electric Company of the United States
As can be seen from the above development stages, with the progress and development of society, the concepts and methods of quality management are constantly being updated and improved. At present, Total Quality Management (QM), which is highly respected by the industry, essentially refers to the quality management of all employees and the whole process, and everyone in the unit plays a certain role in it. Quality management is no longer just a matter for quality departments and business departments, including planning, design, research and development, operation and even logistics support and management departments are closely related to quality management. Quality management is no longer just a technical problem of measuring data, comparing standards and judging advantages and disadvantages. It is no longer just a problem of group activities to grasp the state, find out the reasons, formulate countermeasures and verify the effect, but more and more transcends technology and rises to the management level.
2. Several issues that need to be clarified
(1) The performance or function of a product is not the quality of the product.
The quality of service products is not determined by the appearance and characteristics of products. Improving the appearance of service products can not improve their quality, but only change the value of products. There is no necessary causal relationship between the performance and characteristics of service products and the quality of products, they are just the capabilities of products. A meteorological data service system can't be regarded as a successful service system if the timeliness of observation data and the accuracy of elements can't meet the requirements, even if its interface is gorgeous and provides users with dazzling technical means.
(2) high quality is not expensive.
High product quality does not mean high price. On the contrary, according to Deming's theory, high product quality can lead to cost reduction, efficiency improvement and profit increase: because for production enterprises, it will lead to the lowest rate of waste or defective products, thus reducing production costs, improving production efficiency, and then increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty, so profits will increase. On the other hand, if the product quality is defective, the rejection rate will remain high, making it impossible to reduce the production cost of the product; Second, once the products with defective quality enter the market, the tangible or intangible losses at the client will be greater, thus making the intangible cost of the products higher. The same is true of the meteorological department.
So high quality is not expensive, but inferior quality is expensive.
(3) The quality shall conform to the specifications and shall be continuously improved.
In the past, specifications and standards were used as the criteria for judging quality, and the quality of products was measured by checking whether the products met the specifications through inspection and audit. Under this quality concept, once the product quality meets the specifications, any efforts to improve the quality will be stopped.
The traditional concept of quality ignores that users are the most important part of the production line, and also ignores the needs of users who are most sensitive to the quality of products and services, and these users can always put forward new demands for products. If a service product is confirmed by users, it will be the same and last forever, then with the increasing demand of users, the satisfaction of products to users' needs will also decrease, which leads to the decline of the actual quality of products (that is, the satisfaction of users) although the production process of products remains unchanged.
High-quality products and services ensure users' satisfaction with products and service providers, and users' satisfaction determines the rise and fall of products and service providers. In this sense, the continuous improvement of product quality is a matter of life and death for its production units.
(4) Quality comes from satisfied, enthusiastic and loyal employees.
"People-oriented" has become the motto of management work more than ten years ago; Indeed, if the employees of a unit are full of frustration and insecurity about the future, don't trust the leaders and often work in fear; Then, an important factor to improve quality, that is, cooperation between employees and between employees and leaders, will not really exist. Not to mention the pride and dedication necessary to create quality. The "fear" mentioned here refers to the specified amount, performance and related reward and punishment measures.
The fate of units and employees should be tied together, which is a win-win concept. Only when people in the unit have a sense of security and like what they do can they get high quality.
(5) Quality is decided by top managers, not everyone's work. In Deming's view, for a unit, quality is the first, and it should become a value. Quality is not only the special responsibility of the quality control department or quality experts, but also the responsibility decided by the top management and shared by all employees of the unit. Quality, especially the responsibility of top managers, because they have greater decision-making power, a unit's policy can limit or promote the continuous improvement of quality.
The top management of any unit does not want to see that the policies formulated by itself limit the continuous improvement of work and service quality. But in fact, the problems in some management concepts and methods adopted by it have played a role in limiting the improvement of work and service quality between tangible and intangible.
3. The inherent defects of "management by objectives"
Management by objectives is a management method in which each department and employee establishes their own specific work objectives according to the overall objectives of the unit, and they are responsible for planning, implementing, controlling and assessing. It is a way to measure performance and pay salary by taking the work achievements that individuals should achieve in a certain period as the goal and the actual achievements as the way.
The inherent defect of target management is that it regards the realization of goals (even quotas) as the only measure to judge the effectiveness of work; Although this method can make the unit obtain direct work results (achieve goals), the existence of goals and the parallel "performance appraisal" will inevitably lead to the prevalence of the value orientation of "taking the completion of goals and tasks as the only direction of efforts", and employees are always shrouded in the shadow of "performance appraisal" and passively become slaves to goals, thus losing the motivation to improve the system. Don't make progress if the goal is within the system's ability, and wait for the system to complete the goal and task with peace of mind; When the goal is beyond the scope of the system, blame others and try to lower the goal level; However, when the objectives and tasks cannot be changed and the sword of performance appraisal is sacrificed, the assessed can only resort to unscrupulous means or even fraud for their own interests.
In addition, ranking or scoring performance appraisal will artificially create a group of losers with high work enthusiasm, frustrated self-confidence and full of complaints. Because their poor performance is largely determined by the system beyond their control, rather than their lack of efforts. In fact, any employee doesn't want him to keep making mistakes, and once the mistakes keep appearing, the system can't be perfected. In order to avoid the negative consequences of accountability to individuals (or collectives), employees have to try their best to hide these mistakes to avoid the strict eyes of performance appraisal. Therefore, the stronger the fear, the worse the work effect of employees.
Fear leads to inefficiency and lies. Without accurate information, managers cannot make correct decisions. The Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s is a typical example. At that time, behind the national madness was irrelevant and absurd target management and majestic discipline control (that is, the current "performance appraisal"). Its extremely disastrous consequences are still shocking.
The results of performance appraisal determine the personal interests of employees and lead to competition among team members. The result of helping others will lead to a relative decline in your grades. For the sake of personal interests, no team member wants to see his grades reduced because of his own efforts. This is a vicious competition, which will promote the division of a team and the indifference among colleagues, and make the organization lose its warmth.
Although the original intention of performance appraisal may be to improve the effectiveness of work, its inherent defects often make it a simple evaluation and judgment, and less involved in improvement, thus making performance appraisal deviate from the original goal. Because performance appraisal is actually encouraging superficiality and encouraging people to ask "who?" Instead of asking, "Why?" . Performance appraisal ignores that the system will be biased, and most problems are caused by the system itself; Pay most attention to individuals (or groups) and give up opportunities for system improvement; In fact, most of the problems lie in the perfection of the system and process itself, not in individuals or groups.
According to the statistical results of authoritative departments, there is no effective research to prove that the situation of an organization after performance appraisal is better than before, but more negative lessons have been seen: Bank of America once formulated the most ambitious target performance appraisal reward and punishment system in the United States, and the performance of loan officers is determined by the amount of loans issued. The best performer gets more than 50% of the income of the middle-level person. As a result, the amount of bank loans in the United States has indeed increased substantially in a short period of time, but although banks have achieved the results of management objectives temporarily, they have suffered huge losses afterwards. Therefore, only looking at the target results without considering the more important potential factors such as quality, existing problems or risks, the cost and poor prognosis are often not worth the candle.
4. Continuous improvement of business system is one of the important measures to ensure business quality.
(1) The quality standards of products and services are constantly changing.
With the development of career and social progress, people constantly put forward new and higher requirements for products and services. Twenty years ago, people's demand for meteorological data services could only be satisfied with obtaining data, even manual copying was acceptable. Today, people's requirements for meteorological data services have been raised from simply obtaining data to obtaining accurate data, obtaining high-density accurate data, obtaining various forms of data from various sources and obtaining data with multiple functions. The original data products and services can no longer meet the new requirements; In fact, the original service system and product production process have not changed; In other words, the existing products and services meet the quality standards of 20 years ago, but they can't actually meet the current user needs. That is, products and services that met quality standards 20 years ago are not up to standard today.
(2) Most of the defects of products and services are caused by systems, and business systems and business processes can be improved forever.
Product quality is produced by the production system. Broadly speaking, a system that can operate normally is basically a stable system, including its products and services. According to the statistics of authoritative departments, in most cases, 94% of the quality problems of products and services are caused by the system itself, including the quality problems caused by the continuous improvement of quality standards without a perfect system. In other words, most of the quality problems are caused by the capacity limitation of the system. However, this kind of quality problem caused by the limitation of system capacity cannot be fundamentally solved only by target management and performance appraisal. In this case, the compulsory implementation of management by objectives is essentially to attribute the problems caused by the system itself to employees who are powerless to the system, and think that the defects are caused by employees-obviously, this is not a good and responsible method.
Therefore, the most fundamental way to ensure the quality of products and services is to continuously improve the system according to the needs in the whole life cycle of the system-that is, to truly establish the management concept and working mechanism of continuous improvement of business systems.
No matter how optimistic the business system is, it can always be improved, because the quality standards are constantly changing and developing, so there is no perfect system and process. Only by constantly improving the system and process can the meteorological department improve the quality of products and services. On the contrary, only by constantly improving the business system according to the actual needs can we ensure the stability of business quality and meet the increasing service requirements and expectations of the government, society and the public for the meteorological department in time.
(3) continuous improvement needs a good atmosphere
TQM believes that quality is "produced by system" and "managed and prevented". Only by finding the problems in the system in time can we improve it, thus ensuring the quality of products and services. This requires the participation of all employees related to the system; To achieve this goal, all employees need to be highly satisfied with the cause and unit, full of enthusiasm and loyalty. Comrade Xiaoping said: "A good system can turn bad people into good people, and a bad system can turn good people into bad people." . It is hard to imagine that employees who are in "fear" can actively and enthusiastically find problems and make suggestions. Therefore, a good working atmosphere is one of the prerequisites to achieve total quality management, and good management concepts and methods can create this valuable working atmosphere.
5. Conclusion
Continuously improving service quality is an eternal topic in meteorological industry. Quality comes from the system. Only by constantly improving the system according to the needs can the service quality meet the new requirements under the new situation and environment.
The continuous improvement of the system requires the enthusiastic participation of all relevant personnel. For a unit, the enthusiasm and loyalty of employees to the unit is extremely valuable wealth, and leaders should put the greatest energy into it; The most important thing is to choose and formulate benign management methods and create a benign working atmosphere. www.vfbxg.com