Going beyond quality standards or adapting them to oneself?
Lee la versión en español aquí.
If you gather a group of entrepreneurs between the ages of 20 and 25 and ask them to play a free association game with words such as quality management systems, ISO standard, audits, or any other similar words, the immediate association would probably be: structure, hierarchy, ancient, bureaucracy, and such.
Where am I going with this? There is a very strong misconception about quality management systems as something that only belongs to big corporations, these bureaucratic giants that are only good for hindering day-to-day work and killing creativity. I believe the experience I am going to narrate next, shows that there is another possibility.
In March 2014, Wolox was an almost-three-year startup with about 20 employees and an excellent reputation. Above all, it had its own culture: fun, relaxed, unstructured, young and innovative. If you don’t know about Wolox’ story, I recommend you read ‘A Flock of Entrepreneurs’ by Santiago Bermúdez Baglietto.
Today, a year later, Wolox is a company with over 60 employees, working with clients worldwide. It is a startup that keeps its unique and singular culture, but it has also found a way to be increasingly efficient and to adapt the industry’s good practices to each of its areas.
We are turning into a company that understands that the focus should be the client’s satisfaction, in order to develop high-quality products that solve real problems.
A year ago we set a goal to double our employees in 2014 and 2015. We then realized that, in order to grow at the rate we had planned and to keep delivering high-quality innovating products, we needed to make some changes. One of them was starting to think about our work in terms of processes.
Implementation of standards and quality management systems was something new for Wolox. Before we began, we agreed on a single premise: If the implementation resulted in bringing about more problems than solutions, if we needed to change things we thought were working well, or if bureaucracy was added to our everyday work, then that was not the right path for us.
Therefore, the biggest challenge was always adapting the standard for our benefit instead of adapting ourselves to it.
Appropriating and re-signifying each of the standard’s points was the best way we found to accomplish this goal. For example, Trello is our everyday tool and we were not willing to stop using it. For us, the traditional signature on a document is obsolete. Instead, we have Google Drive or Dropbox history, and we believe an email or a Slack chat can be considered an equally valid record.
Now that we have been certified, I can assure you that the standard seeks for the company’s processes to be documented, and that employees comply with those processes. Its aim is not to interfere with the way we do things or be a burden that limits innovation.
Everyone is free to put together their own quality management system, as long as it reflects the reality and follows certain general guidelines.
See also: Building Trust with Games
Being able to adapt the ISO 9001 standard to the way Wolox works was a huge challenge that has helped us grow day after day. Some of the improvements we have implemented over this last year are:
- Establishing the company’s vision and the short- and long-term mission, shared and known by everyone working at Wolox.
- Automating a great number of tasks, helping us to be more productive and getting significant metrics on the processes.
- Holding monthly meetings with the heads of all areas to discuss ways in which the company can improve. This is certainly the place where new ideas and solutions are born, and it also keeps all areas informed and focused on common objectives.
- Creating documents permanently, used to train new employees.
- Generating a career plan and an evaluation system for employees, allowing a greater degree of transparency when transmitting information related to their salaries, potential for growth, personal goals, etc.
I hope that now that we have revealed how we decided to implement our quality management system at Wolox, and some of the benefits the implementation has brought to us, more startups will choose to follow this continuous improvement path.
Posted by Luciana Reznik (luciana.reznik@wolox.com.ar)
