Chocolate, you and World Quality Day
Introduced by the United Nations in 1990, World Quality Day is an initiative to showcase the contribution of quality management to sustainable development within organizations and countries across the globe. On the second Thursday of November every year, businesses across the world take part in a variety of activities such as business-wide seminars, presentations, quizzes and competitions at their workplace. Events are usually organized by quality professionals based within organizations and are designed to spread the ‘importance of quality’ message to non-quality professionals.
More organizations are starting to recognize the importance of quality – a recent survey of company CEOs, Presidents and Chairs said that achieving ‘operational excellence’ is one of the biggest challenges for them. When applied to organizations, the function of quality is to protect and enhance reputations, improve profitability and drive change. Ultimately, quality is an outcome – a characteristic of a product or service provided to a customer, and the hallmark of an organization which has satisfied all of its stakeholders.
The Chartered Quality Institute publish a series of free resources each year which are for use by professionals looking to promote the day within their business and publicize their World Quality Day events. These free resources include posters, event templates, screen savers and information documents. This year, they have an enticing offer: the CQI Chocolate Challenge. Visit www.thecqi.org/Community/World-Quality-Day for more information and to participate!
In the same spirit, the European Quality Week, organized annually by EOQ, will be celebrated this year in the period of November 9 - 15, 2015 under the slogan "Quality-Emotion-Inspiration". If you’re in Europe, visit their site www.eoq.org for dates, locations and details. And get inspired to celebrate Quality!
2008 saw the first World Quality Day conference in London, which provided a forum for innovation, inspiration and creative ideas. Since 2010, there has been a different theme every year:
- ‘Building a Quality World Together’ focused on the impact quality professionals make to an organization ‘Making Collaboration Count’ was designed to reflect the importance of collaborating with colleagues, departments and partner organizations
- ‘Quality: Delivering Competitive Advantage’ showed that quality management and its focus on improving efficiency and productivity can help organizations achieve a strong competitive advantage
- 'In Pursuit of Excellence’ recognized that in order to succeed, organizations must continuously strive to improve
- 'Out of the Crisis' focused on what a fit organization looks like and the role that quality management professionals play in facilitating fitness.