You can see them everywhere on Saturday morning. The dads ‘coaching’ their offspring in a fanatic way, only dreaming of having a new Babe Ruth. You can hear them screaming from the sideline and shouting whenever ‘junior’ misses a hit or drops a ball. “You can do better, how is it possible?”. Just take a look at ‘junior’ and you will see that he is so embarrassed he could crawl into a hole. He just wanted to play for fun? After a while, unfortunately, you see a lot of gloves and bats sitting in the garage, gathering dust.

20 years later, this boy enters a working environment. He was raised in an environment where there wasn’t a lot of tolerance towards making errors… and now he has to be open to “improving”. He has to smile whenever someone tells him he made an error. He’s forced to acknowledge errors are counted as key statistics for each game. It’s not surprising the blaming mentality carries over to the job!

It is vital to communicate as much as possible on improvement projects.
Everyone, in every layer of the organization has to be informed about the importance of improvement projects in an appropriate language. With a clear reference to the environment of, “What’s in it for me?”, make it clear that errors are accepted as long as we learn from our mistakes without pointing the finger of blame.

And what’s the situation in your company: a learning culture or a blaming culture? How have you helped your company to avoid or overcome a blaming culture?

1. Don’t react emotionally. It’s a proven method not to react on a complaint right away. Be prepared to listen when it’s a non-written complaint. Make notes of everything and promise to call back within x hours or days.
2. Always fulfill your promises and always respect deadlines.
3. Never only react in writing. It is proof of elementary courtesy and customer friendliness to at least give the customer a short phone call to elucidate your reply.
4. Be grateful for the fact that the customer even bothers informing you about his dissatisfaction. Don’t forget that this means the customer values the cooperation enough to give you another shot. Look at complaints as being chances!
5. Learn from your mistakes. Create an overview of the most common complaints on a regular basis and think about a possible cause. This can lead to the “quick wins” to perform better in the future.

In Europe, more and more medical labs pursue ISO 15189 certification. This standard is based on ISO 17025 (thus also on ISO 9001) but with more specific demands and guidelines specific to medical labs. In 2007, an updated/revised version was published for a standard dating from 2003. Despite the fact that it is not an obligation in Europe yet, the European medical world invests more and more to get certified. In the United States where FDA rules the medical world, it is a requirement. Therefore, companies that want to be active on both continents will be facing a double certification for a while.

A lot of companies are wondering why they should get accreditation for their quality system. Here are my top three reasons, not necessarily in the specific order of importance:

1. To give a (commercial) signal of trust to the market/customers about the qualitative approach of your organization.
2. To get external “objective” pressure (in order to force yourself to KEEP ON working on it).
3. Because a customer or the market requires you to.

The second reason is in fact the most important one to discuss, especially because it’s the only reason that comes out of free will. If a customer or the market demands it, you have no option. Opting consciously for accreditation is something you do in order to create that pressure. An objective authority checking up on you on a regular basis to see whether you’re still reaching your goals and demands makes sure you don’t lose focus. Whenever this external pressure is gone, companies tend to slide back to their old (bad) habits. All the previous excuses (too busy, too bureaucratic, we have to be “flexible”…) are stated again and cause a return to old ways of trying to meet quality requirements.