In the book The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle explains that an organization’s culture is defined by what they care about. As lab managers, we need all staff to care about the quality of the lab’s outcomes and deliverables. Furthermore, in their book Unleashed, Harvard professors Frances Frei and Anne Morriss describe culture as “…how things are really done around here.” To build a culture of quality, lab managers need to align how high-quality lab work is performed with what the staff really cares about. Here are five tips to help you develop and grow a culture of quality for your lab.
Define quality
Developing a culture of quality means expanding the definition of lab quality beyond compliance and inspection. It means ensuring that the lab quality program and expectations extend to concepts like fit-for-purpose, prevention, and improvement. The quality program needs to be integrated with other lab values, such as scientific credibility, safety, reputation, and service to stakeholders.
Priorities
All labs have competing priorities, especially around where time and money are spent. To develop a robust culture of quality, decisions will need to be made to ensure the program's robustness and the lab's long-term reliability. The staff will be inspecting the decisions, looking for what gets delayed, postponed, and forgotten. To develop a culture of quality, it needs to be at the forefront of the key decisions.
Responses
How leadership responds to problems sends a clear message to staff and stakeholders about the quality program's effectiveness. Lab managers can help build a culture of quality by focusing on learning over blame and transparency over silence when issues occur. In labs with strong cultures of quality, the focus is on treating near misses as important data and asking what allowed the problem to occur, rather than simply looking for someone to blame. This investigative approach is greatly aided by a strong culture of psychological safety that enables hard discussions without the threat of blame or retribution.
Ownership
In a lab with a strong culture of quality, the quality program is owned by everyone. While the formal quality team may lead, responsibility for delivery is distributed across the lab. This is shared ownership, rather than using the quality assurance team as an internal police force to enforce policies and procedures. Everyone is empowered to make decisions to enhance the quality of the lab’s results.
Measures
Effective metrics and measures enable the quality program to be managed and improved. Strong quality cultures focus on leading indicators that measure process health, enable learning, and support proactive decision-making. These types of labs have useful discussions about transparency and use the metrics to improve the system, rather than simply punishing the staff.
Improving or developing a strong culture of quality enables labs to elevate their performance by engaging the entire lab in the mission to deliver high-quality results and meet stakeholders' needs.
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