Quality Awareness & Stress Prevention Month Let’s recognize world QUALITY AWARENESS month and STRESS PREVENTION month together. Yes, together!

If you are stressed at work or home or working from home, what are the root causes of your stress? 

1. Lots of changes

2. High demands on your time

3. Poor Quality of Work

4. What other root causes of your stress? [No personal attacks on your children, significant other, or team members, please.]

This is the month to consider quality of work.  Quality  is the degree to which a process, product, or service satisfies a specified set of wants or requirements. When quality is poor this brings on  Stress ; stress on you, your team members, the system, and your customers.

Going deeper, what are the root causes of poor quality?

The #1 cause of poor quality can be founds in  Things gone wrong  = Any unexpected outcome in the form of

• Defects: Output of work that does not meet standards, specifications, or expectations.
• Variation: inconsistency in completing the same tasks.
• Rework / Fixing: Effort to correct a defect.

The cause of poor quality may be in these other forms of waste too, see all forms of waste here.

How to accomplish both – Improve quality and decrease stress?

Quality awareness brings with it several tried and true quality methods and techniques. Not only can these help reduce or eliminate things gone wrong, they also help reduce stress, frustration, and time consumed in fixing poor quality. What quality method or technique have you tried?

1.  Finding and relentlessly eliminate wastes.

2. Process Mapping to understand a process; what is done, who does it, and identify where in process do mistakes and poor quality begin.

3. Cause and Effect analysis to ask why, why, why to identify solutions that fix the root causes of problems.

4. Mistake proofing to redesign how work gets done making it impossible for a mistake occur.

5. FMEA (Failure Mode Effect Analysis) to proactively identify where quality failures can occur and eliminate them.  See learning opportunity below.

6.  Kaizen to rapidly improve work processes.

7.  Lean-Six Sigma to use data and statistics to guide work process consistency.

Benefits gain from increasing Quality and reducing Stress:

In the spirit of world quality awareness month AND stress prevention month continue learning how to improve quality and reduce your work stress.