Working from home as a Quality Manager

Working from home can become quite tiresome and repetitive but it also holds some great opportunities for you as a Quality Manager. Normally you are running around with little time left to make fundamental improvements. We all know that it is important, but lots of us are just too busy with the day-to-day business. The distraction from colleagues and accidents that need to be solved right away doesn’t help with the overall improvements.

Review Procedure

Not being interrupted by your colleagues is a blessing when it comes to cleaning up procedures. During busy times, colleagues drop in with all kinds of questions. Most Quality Managers are being busy with other things due to the role they have in the organization. They are in the middle of everything that is going on, so most departments go to the Quality Managers when they have business questions. You might not know the answer, but most of the time you know who does or where someone needs to look to find the answer.

Being forced to work from home allows you to fully concentrate on reviewing the documents and really making some progress on improving them. Of course, don’t do this in full isolation; include people in the team to review the improvements via any web conference solution, like Zoom or Microsoft Teams.

Analyze Data Thoroughly

A thorough analysis of data is another great activity you can do while working from home. We don’t mean creating a pie chart or a histogram. Great platforms will create these graphs for you. We are talking about real analysis and putting context to the data. Technology can visualize the data, but for years to come it won’t be able to make decisions for you on what to do. Yes, artificial intelligence will have a great impact here, but it will not be able to make these informed decisions for the coming years, if not decades, for now, it can only assist you. You know why certain deviations happened and maybe also what went wrong. Use these difficult times to advance and analyze the data you have.

Build Improvement Plans

In line with the analysis done in the previous step, use the analysis to create some great improvement plans that you can do when things come back to normal again. Lots of improvements fix the problem at hand but hardly the true root cause. Sitting at home gives you an excellent opportunity to have a deeper understanding of what went wrong. You can create improvement plans that solve the root cause. Also look back at the last couple of months. What things went right and what went wrong? Make a list of all these things and communicate this with the different departments in the company.

Then they can look at this and make a plan for the next couple of months, what they want to improve in their work and what their goals are for the rest of the year. Now everybody has a goal to work for and they can look forward to get back to work and start working on completing these goals. Then everybody has new energy to get started again.

To conclude, please look at the bright site of things and use these exceptionally difficult times to your advantage. Start to improve the organization, but make sure to involve the rest of the team. This way, everybody is motivated to start working again after the Corona isolation is over.