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How do we define culture? If we look it up, we can find a couple of definitions. Most of them define it as the customs, arts, achievements of a particular group of people. If you ask me, I think that the one that best describes my industry is:
“The way of life, general customs and beliefs of a particular group of people at a particular time” (Cambridge Dictionary)
If we think about quality, first things that come to our mind are: procedures, process & quality controls plan, inspection records, checklists and the like. However, if we don’t believe that they can help our company achieve its goals, it means we don’t have a good Quality Culture.
So, what is Quality Culture? To put it simply, to me, it means that our people believe in the company’s processes and procedures and understand that adhering to them make us a better team. It means to be customer-focused by having a culture to create value for them by innovating and improving products, services and processes. By creating a customer-focused Quality Culture, we can understand quality through their eyes and drive a collaborative culture to improve services and resolve problems together.
Three years ago, when FieldCore was created, we took the time to identify the areas we needed to work on and improve, to understand what work needed to be done. One of them was Quality Culture; many of our employees did not understand what our processes were and their purpose – we had to change this.
Since then, I am happy to say that we have returned more than 150 days of power generation to our customers in Latin America alone. This improvement is reflected in their recognition of our work through different channels like meetings, letters and customer satisfaction surveys. To achieve this, many actions were implemented, starting with the most important one … to closely and thoroughly follow our processes and procedures from the planning to the execution phase. This result has only been possible thanks to the team’s commitment and discipline in working alongside the customer to prevent human errors and deliver with high quality standards. However, this hasn’t been an easy journey and we need to continue to work really hard to keep our Quality Culture present and alive in everything we do.
This month we celebrate Quality Month and I want to encourage all of you to remember what Quality truly represents – a collaborative effort between you and your customer to achieve the highest possible quality of the services offered. I want to take this opportunity to thank and recognize everyone at FieldCore who is making this cultural change possible – especially our field and staff employees who are dealing every day with this complex and complicated pandemic situation, that has required us to demonstrate the strength of our Quality Culture more than ever before to ensure we deliver seamlessly and without any safety or quality concerns.
Let’s celebrate Quality Month by continuing to strive for a Quality Culture in everything we do.
