Who needs a Quality Policy?

Most corporate Quality Policies are worthless, and this is one area where the current ISO 9001 standard just makes things worse. But it shouldn’t have to be like this.

The whole point of setting a policy is that it gives you a framework for making decisions, so you don’t have to improvise every case from scratch. Let’s say you sell clothing, and one day a customer comes in to return a sweater. The sweater is made from some expensive fabric and has a label that clearly says “DRY CLEAN ONLY”; but the customer ignored the label, washed it with the rest of his laundry in an ordinary washing machine, and ruined it. So now he wants his money back. If you have a Returns Policy, then your sales associates know what to do: accept the return because keeping customer goodwill is worth putting up with a certain amount of foolishness; or tell the customer he's out of luck because he caused his own problem. No sales associate should have to figure out that answer in real time while the customer is standing there shouting. 

But what kind of decisions are you trying to support with a generalized Quality Policy? Does any employee ever tell himself, “I just can’t decide whether to do a good job or not; so I sure am glad there’s a Policy saying I should”? I didn’t think so.

What’s more, if you don’t know what problem you are trying to solve, you’re not going to solve anything very well. This is why most corporate Quality Policies sound like lukewarm vanilla pudding: they are not written to meet any real need, so they end up as meaningless blather.

This, in turn, enables a well-known auditor trick. Clause 5.2.2 (b) of ISO 9001:2015 requires that “The quality policy shall be communicated, understood and applied within the organization.” So if the audit is going slowly and the auditor wants to pad his list of nonconformities,* he can pull someone off the floor and ask, “What’s the Quality Policy? Explain it to me.” The employee probably went through a training session that covered this back when he was hired, but nobody in the company has ever mentioned it since and the employee has forgotten it. Even if there are posters on the wall spelling out the Policy, the employee can’t explain it because it’s lukewarm vanilla pudding. So the auditor gets to write a nonconformity almost for free. After the audit is done this finding will be assigned to senior management for corrective action; senior management will make everyone go to another training session on the Quality Policy; and a month later everyone will have forgotten it all again. The organization will have gone through lots of activity and will have gotten no meaningful result out of it.

Now, it’s possible to write a memorable Quality Policy. The problem is that ISO 9001 won’t let you. Clauses 5.2.1 (c) and (d) specifically require that your Quality Policy “includes a commitment to satisfy applicable requirements,” and “includes a commitment to continual improvement of the quality management system.” Christopher Paris, in his delightful book Surviving ISO 9001:2015, tells the story of a client whose Quality Policy didn’t include those exact words but had other words that meant the same thing. Paris asked TC 176 (the ISO committee responsible for ISO 9001) for a ruling whether his client’s Quality Policy was acceptable, and the answer came back No.

Off the cuff I can think of two corporate Quality Policies that are memorable and meaningful.** Neither one has any explicit words about satisfying requirements. Neither one uses the phrase “continual improvement.” But they both define crisply how the company wants to relate to its customers and the world.

• Nordstrom has made the strategic decision that what differentiates them from all their competitors is the level of service they offer. So the first and most important point in their Code of Business Conduct and Ethics is: Use good judgment in all situations. This is the policy that empowers Nordstrom associates to do whatever it takes to make things right for the customer. 
• Lands’ End traditionally advertised a policy that was even shorter and crisper: Guaranteed. Period.*** 

At the other extreme I’ve seen Quality Policies that are six or seven paragraphs long. Maybe it is no surprise that employees of those companies often can't explain those policies very well.

We can do better. But it’s not easy.

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* To be clear, auditors are not paid by the finding and no decent auditor wastes your time writing worthless nonconformities just so his report is longer. I’m sorry to say that doesn’t mean I’ve never seen it happen.

** That’s not to say there aren’t others, of course.

*** Just now, as I am writing this post, I checked on the Internet and saw reports that they finally gave up the policy this year (2021). I also found Lands’ End websites (for example this one or this one, as of mid-August 2021) that still use it. So I’m not sure of the current status.