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HOW TO TRAIN FOR TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT?
Are you going for Global quality? Then, don't forget to take your shop
floor worker abroad along with you. As CEOs aim for total quality,
quality managers across the country are upping the ante on shop floor
training. No longer are they content transplanting Japanese quality
systems in their manufacturing units, instead they are spurring teams
to shop floor workers to gird the globe in search of quality practices.
The rationale is simple. Basically the knowledge-base that a shop
floor worker needs to produce quality has two components:
functional skills and background knowledge. While functional skills
teach workers how to achieve quality, background knowledge tries to
explain why quality is important in the first place. So the latter is a
fundamental issue as it allows the shop floor worker to see how he fits
in with the performance of a product and eventually, with the
customer. It's also the more difficult of the two to teach. While
companies have been toying with the idea so far, they are now putting
their money where there minds are. Going global in training
practices, many companies are taking their shop floor workers to visit
quality environments abroad. Managing Director of Daewoo says
"Giving our workers knowledge beyond their own work area is a
critical part of our training strategy. Here are four quality reasons
why companies are training their workers abroad:
worthwhile experience when they met the Chinese workers they could
see for themselves how things were different there and how the
Chinese work and the gains from this trip are already payable at the
Madura Coats plants in Bangalore and Tamil Nadu.
Communicate Quality
More often than not, when managers try to explain the big picture to
workers, it is met negatively, accepts the HRD Chief Mahindra &
Mahindra (M & M): "It's a problem because the shop floor staff gets
suspicious if managers suddenly start talking to them about the
business and its future. That is an apprehension that line managers
and the human resource team has to manage and dispel." In order to
cross the communication chasm, M & M decided to send its workers
abroad to expose them to quality manufacturing practices. But there
was one subtle difference, the teams going abroad included a mix of
White collars and blue collars from several levels. By the end of the
trip, most communication barriers had been bridged. By now, M& M
must have sent around 40 shop floor worker, along with managers
and union leaders to Japan, South Korea, Europe and the UK and the
United States. Mostly, they visit automotive plants and are
encouraged to interact with the host companies and learn their
business practices, work ethics and even the social norms in those
countries. On their return, the teams are debriefed on the trip, the
training module, and their impressions of work processes and
conditions abroad. Then, they are asked to share their experiences
with their colleagues. The fact that everyone is learning together is
DCM Daewoos workers, after one trip to Seoul, are not only
motivated, but are also finally able to see quality from the user's
perspective.
Showcase Customer Quality
If the Rs. 733 crore Ranbaxy Laboratories is giving its workers
exposure abroad, it is not because the company has a problem.
Instead, the programme is intended to give workers a view of a
culture where attitudes towards hygiene are fundamentally different.
For the pharmaceuticals manufacturer found that most of its workers
came from a background where even a hospital did not display the
kind of hygiene Ranbaxy was trying to achieve.
The Director (Pharmaceuticals Manufacturing) says that "hygiene can
be taught as a part of the work procedure. But to embed the concept
in the minds of workers needs something more. So, Ranbaxy drew
lots to select 20 workers from its Dewas plant in Madhya
Pradesh and sent them on a 10-day trip to the US. But the study tour's
focus was not on functional training but more in the nature of cultural
acclimatization and exposure.
Visiting clinics and hospitals, the workers got a feel of the kind of
environment in which medicines made by them would be used and
came away with indelible memories of high quality standards. Says
the General Manager (TQM): "The idea is to help the people to relate
what they are doing on the shop floor to the customer's life. This is
not something that is meant to have an immediate measurable
impact. Eventually, the battle for quality will be won or lost in the
mind of the shop floor worker."
Best Practices
Provide workers first hand experience of global best practices.
It Ensure that supervisors and managers are trained along with
workers.
Expose workers to the environments in which customers use
your products.
Constantly retrain workers in the theory and practice of TQM.
Link quality in the workplace to quality in the worker's lives.
Activity B:
a) Write down four quality reasons for companies sending their
workers abroad.
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the
organisation:
task
employees,
formal
organisation
one-to-one
coaching,
team-building,
facilitating,
correcting,
guiding,
promoting,
controlling
and
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b) Write down two skills of a facilitator.
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8.5 ROLE OF THE 21st CENTURY TRAINER
A useful way to approach the role of the 21st century trainer will be to
look through the eyes of the manager whom you wish would regard
you as indispensable. If I were a manager, What would cause me to
say, "Here's someone I know I can count on to get the job done,
someone I've just got on my team." What would make me willing to
take this person to an important business meeting and not worry that
he will embarrass me either or the company or the mission? What
would make me say, "Here is someone I would be proud to have a talk
with our managers or our customers anywhere in the world. "
What would such a person be like? What would she wear? How would
she speak? Most important, what could he/she do? The answers point
us to some of the key characteristics of the 21st century survivor. Here
are some characteristics:
may
be
specialists
in
classroom
presentation
or
skilled:
Companies
will
be
looking
for
the day. These will be people who are able to respond with skill
and confidence when a manager says: "I need you to do a
performance analysis in the manufacturing area of our
Malaysian division." "Go teach our new vision course to our
managers in Milan. Go draft an evaluation plan for the new
mind-reading course we're developing."
Survivors will be those who have mastered the basic skills of
performance technology, and who keep struggling to master the
latest hardware and software tools that continue to rain down
on us. The losers will be those who continue to apply training to
all situations, who can't recognise the need for non training
interventions, and who don't know how to guarantee the results
of training when it is the right thing to do.
3. Socially skilled: Well-honed interpersonal skills will be
increasingly critical as well. One could argue that social skills
are even more important than technical skills, just look at the
people you know personally who survive because of their ability
to get along, rather than because of their ability to do their jobs.
Some years ago a Labour Department study concluded that
something like 75% of workers who lost their jobs didn't lose
them because they lacked technical or occupational skills with
which to do those jobs; they lost out because they didn't have
the social skills they needed to keep the jobs. But while social
skills have always been important, they'll become more vital as
time goes on. Why?
b) Write down two reasons why social skills have become important.
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Summary
This unit focuses on the dimensions of training and its growth in the
new economy. In the new economy, many organisations are becoming
learning organisations, where training is an inherent activity. Success,
therefore, can be derived from a learning culture where training and
development become demand-led rather than supply-driven. With
the genuine and enthusiastic commitment and backing of top
management and the allocation of resources to much training will
work to ensure that organisations attract, train, develop and retain
the people talent, needed to guide them successfully through the
corning decade and into the next century. Participative leadership of a
learning culture, supported by goal-oriented human resource
development, means that organisations will generate better solutions
from their own commitment, experience and creativity and training
for change will make it work.
The unit further focuses on how to increase the quality of training.
There are four reasons why companies should train their workers on
quality: bring quality alive, communicate quality build quality skills
and showcase customer quality. The unit also highlights how training