It is a common situation when a company’s development is concentrated in the hands of the CEO, a founder, or a business owner. As long as he has regular calls with heads of departments, offers innovation — the company is developing in some way. When he switches to another question, the development stops.
The bigger the business the more difficult it is to pay attention to every aspect of the company’s development. The only chance for qualitative and quantitative growth — a tuned-in system, where each department and employee is separately developing without direct management.
Continuous growth and improvement is a part of Digis’ philosophy. We track our clients’, employees’ and departments’ growth, development of our services and the company as a whole. In this article, I would like to tell you how we refined our development process with the help of the quality control department.
Hubbard administrative technology
L. Ron Hubbard is a founder of The Church of Scientology. He is also famous for his work in education, drug addiction control, and administration, fiction literature.
Scientology today is one of the fastest-growing religions. It is based on a management system that allows religion to infinitely expand.
During three decades Hubbard was involved in the development and systematization of principles activity of Scientology organizations is based on. These principles come from fundamental rules of human behavior. That’s why they are crucial for managing a group.
The main L. Ron Hubbard’s discovery in administration is the Management System. It includes key functions essential for any successful group activity. It is kind of a perfect organizational structure for any activity.
You can compare the system with any organization structure. Some departments may vary, but the general idea remains the same.
When we compared it with Digis’ structure, our team noticed a department that we didn’t have. Quality control department. We started thinking: who was performing functions of the department up to that time. It’s funny, but actually, it was our CEO. As you understand we had the same situation as I described at the beginning of the article: if the CEO isn’t keeping an eye on development, nothing develops.
What the quality control department does
The quality control department monitors the work of other departments, develops standards, controls the work based on the standards, and helps employees to improve next iterations. The whole process helps maintain and improve the quality of all the departments, which, as a result, leads to the company’s growth.
A perfect outcome is when each department and each employee is infinitely and independently improving their quality of work. Everyone who is related to your company: from management to freelancers and office-cleaners should be focused on development.
I like the example of the military fleet which I read about somewhere. When admiralty revised a ship, they could understand how well the things were going, in less than a minute. How? Just by looking at clean buttons on rails. It is impossible to reach such a level of order without a system.
Why it is difficult to grow without this department?
As I have already said a lot of companies do not have a quality control department. Why might this be a problem?
- Company’s growth greatly depends on particular leaders. For instance, you have a proactive and smart CEO. In this case, all the company’s potential will be limited by the potential of this person. When he leaves the company or retires, the company’s growth will stop.
- Company’s development is evaluated only based on results. Have we fulfilled the financial plan? Have we reached our KPIs? If yes, then we think the company is doing well. The practice of setting goals and tracking the results is undoubtedly important and useful. However, numbers do not always objectively represent the company’s success. You can see perfect results, but when you start monitoring the processes, you can find a huge unrealized growth potential of 400%. For example, a plan is fulfilled, but processes are performed just for the record, not as good as they could have been.
- A final result can depend on external o circumstances. And you can realize it only by monitoring processes + final results.
Organization of a quality control department on the example of sales
Here's how we set up such a department at Digis. Simplified interaction scheme:
And now how it works in detail.
A sales manager is working with leads, negotiates, and closes deals. The negotiations have a certain quality. A manager might implement a deal plan, but when we check how he works, we might find that he misses the company’s presentation. If we add it, the conversion will increase by 10%.
If you have a quality control department, a sales manager records his negotiations with a client (with his consent, of course). During a certain period of time, he accumulates audios which he delivers to an audit department. The department has standards: how a sales manager should negotiate with a client with dozens of metrics for different categories. For instance, appearance, self-presentation, company’s presentation, background during a video call, how he reveals a customer’s needs, how he appeals to our unique selling propositions and etc. The audit department assesses each negotiation of the manager based on the metrics and can evaluate his productivity.
The audit results go to the education department. In the department, we have external mentors, top professionals, and industry mastodons. They analyze the report from the audit department and start working with the sales manager: correct his tone of voice, train him to ask more questions to a client and etc. The employees might simply not know how to improve a certain part of their work. The education department helps them by real cases analysis, recommendations for further learning and useful tools, and corrects their scripts. The practice improves the sales managers’ quality of negotiations.
After all lessons were learned the manager again records their work and again delivers audios to the audit department. By this, we can discover the improvements and what aspects of their work are still weak.
As a result, not only managers get the assessment, but you as well see the financial outcome — the number of deals is growing.
Following this example, quality control is set up in other departments as well. The method allows upgrading employees’ skills considerably, which will increase processes efficiency, saving resources and time, and improving customers’ satisfaction. The quality control department helps the company to develop systematically, without dependence on certain leaders.
Important: Quality control department is not a temporary activity. It is an infinite improvement in order to be flexible on the market, use new opportunities quickly.