Is "Busy" Culture a Quality Culture?

"Busyness" is a characteristic of many operating Company. "Busyness" can be a resultof many apparently justifiable reasons. It could be due to many routine work built up to amassive scale, backlog of work, new projects, new requirements, incidents or failures withremedial and corrective action.

Echo of the above sentiments can be easily found in most organisations : "Too muchwork", "No time for any other things except to clear my in-tray", "We need overtime and moreovertime", "We are already stressed greatly, now we have to handle these extra work.

"Busyness" is sometimes associated with the notion that "we work very hard", "to fulfilour obligation as employee to the employer".

But is "Busy" Culture a Quality Culture?

This author would like to put forward a theory that "Busy" Culture is not a Quality Culture,but an indication of "Lack of Quality". The following discussion is from the perspectives ofISO 9000 Quality System Model.

This discussion is not addressing "Time Management" issue, as "Time Management" isstill governed by a greater mental model we have in our mind. "Busyness" perception is astate of mind. This state of mind is governed by a mental model that we may have taken forgranted.

To illustrate the above concept, a simple example is taken by observing a house maidworking behaviour. A new maid with little working experience is introduced to work in anupper middle class family. She will feel very "busy" in carrying out the various items of worklike washing, sweeping the floor, boiling water, tidying up the bed. As she gains experienceand acquires knowledge in using the modern equipment like washing machine, vacuumcleaner etc., she will be able to cope without much problem, hence no more "busyness".Although she still has to perform many tasks, which can be stressful, but not busy.Sometimes she has to perform more tasks, say some guests stay over night, but she can stillcope all right.

After some time, a "busy" culture sets in. She has applied the same frequency of highstandard of cleaning to a room, which was previously the sitting room, now the store room. She has used a worn out broom to sweep the floor, resulting in still dirty floor that requiresmore sweeping. She has not been very disciplined in systematic housekeeping of items foreasy retrieval and usage. She has been accustomed to the "old set of mental model" ofsystem of operation without checking and reviewing the changing environment around her.She will be even more "busy" when the house owner has a new baby for her to take care of.Hence an expression of "busyness" is a testimony of a failure of the present system ofoperation, which implies a rather clumsy and ineffective system.

Without an awareness process of the changing environment and examination of theoriginal set of mental model for system of operation, the housemaid is constantlyoverwhelmed by the "busy" culture. She will feel completely helpless and hence feel more stressful and busy as her present state of mind, based on the old set of model ofmanagement, cannot cope any longer.

An awakening (awareness) process has taken place to some of the organisations inunderstanding better the "busyness" culture after the implementation of the ISO 9000 qualitysystem. A creative and effective application of ISO 9000 management principles can leadsome to understand and question the old set of mental model of management, i.e. the oldparadigm, that resulted in the present condition of "busyness".

The quality audit, focuses on the well designed core-business process, guided by theQuality Manual, Organisation Procedures and various Management Procedures can identifymany system deficiencies (hence improvement) like gaps, duplication, unclear policy, lack ofprocess control etc. etc that cause "busyness".

The old mental model may indulge excessively on a particular mechanism to addresssystem effectiveness. For example, relying too greatly on third level working instruction thatproduces high amount of work instructions that cannot be effectively controlled andadministered. The new model teaches the organisations to use also the first and secondlevels documentation to clarify better the principles, policies or philosophy of work and whoand when.

The old mental model may give the organisations the notion that we are corrective andpreventive action is carried out in the form of taskforce, special study, committee, etc. Butthe new paradigm shows that analysis of the past years so called corrective action withoutstatistical evidence of diminishing of failures / incident trend or tapering off of cumulativeoccurrence of incidents, can only indicate the past corrective action was no more than busyfirefighting exercise as the root causes are not effectively addressed and eliminated.

The old paradigm relies on management good intention to get feedback from staff onsystem improvement, usually by using "Any problem?" questioning mechanism, the ISO9000 model creates a new awareness that a systematic identification of system improvementis necessary in the form of "Internal Quality Audits" by in-house experts or managers.

t is possible that most organsations rely on old mental model, that the "Process is underControl". But the ISO 9000 model has shaken off that assumption when the "Principles ofProcess Control" are more vigorouly applied. Organisations begin to look at the source ofthe data or information that sets the control parameters and limits, they question the validityof the old assumption in line with the current changing or ageing environment.

Management Review is also taken to a greater height and dimension, in reviewing thesystem integrity and effectiveness as a whole and not just a certain aspect like objectivesettings.

Management Representative is certainly a new concept. A person who has nodepartmental boundaries, with a free passport to enter any "territory" for the sole purpose ofensuring system integrity and effectiveness.

With the new mental model, organisations begin to see their daily activities in differentlight : with regard to routine reporting, are there too much dealing on issues (that could beprelude or playing a watchful eye for next firefighting); could the regular meetings berestructured (or re- engineered) to deal more with policies, working principles, awarenessgeneration to staff, effectiveness of corrective action etc. etc.

In this way, "Time Management" under a new paradigm or model, can be applied moremeaningfully and effectively.

As organisations become more disciplined and matured in using the 20 elements (or setof management principles) to address their environment and work process, there will be less"reactive" but more "proactive" in dealing with all sort of scenarios. No more reactiveresponse like "we are too busy" but pro-actively "we will study the underlying system ofoperation and check with the relevant 20 elements for a more balanced way to address thebusyness".

"We are very busy. We need more resources" is a reactive thinking and not proactive as"resources" is only one of the 20 elements of the ISO 9000 model. The old mental modelthat "the only way to fight busyness is asking for more resources" will be discarded by theawakened organisation with creativity.

"Busy Culture" is then a breeding ground for "Quality Culture". It provides ampleopportunity for creativity and improvement using the ISO 9000 model.

End.