Quantifying the Benefits of Quality: Employee Training and Incentives

In 2016, ASQ and APQC partnered to conduct a survey that would provide a comprehensive look at intercontinental quality and continuous improvement methodologies and to explore organizational practices used for quality governance, management and measurement.

This four-part series looks at what helps drive financial benefits from quality, including looking at the relationship between financial benefits and: 

1. the role and uses of quality,
2. governance and standardization of quality,
3. quality training for suppliers, and
4. quality incentives and training for staff.

In part three of this series we expanded the discussion on the benefits of transparency and cross-functional integration with external partners, namely suppliers. What we found was that organizations that establish training for their suppliers tend to reap higher financial benefits from quality efforts. Training provides a common language and helps suppliers understand the impact that defects or other setbacks like delays will have on the end customer, ultimately resulting in a unified focus on the customer and increased financial benefits.

The same ideas of transparency, common language, and understanding the impact of role on quality should also hold true for the organization’s employees. Hence in this final article, we will look more closely at the relationship between employee training and incentives. 

Training Employees and Financial Value

Training programs help develop competencies, ensure employees understand their role in creating quality for the customer, and establish a quality-focused culture. Hence respondents were asked to indicate if they had a formal quality-related training program. Though the majority of organizations do not have a formal training program, more organizations (43%) are investing in a training program than were in 2013 (32%).

Though it can be argued there is intrinsic financial value in offering quality training, there are still unanswered questions such as: Who should receive the training and what training should we provide?

Who Should Get Training?

The majority of respondent organizations (56%) offer (either through direct training or compensation for external training) quality management training for staff involved in quality actives.  Almost half of the respondent organizations (44%) also offer quality-related training to all employees, likely driven by the need to embed a quality-focused culture within the organization. 

To understand where organizations should focus their training resources—in regards to ROI—we ran analysis against the employees offered training and the organizations’ financial benefits of quality (Figure 1).