Total Quality Management: Its Pros and Cons
One advantage of pursuing Total Quality Management from a business point of view is the creation of a loyal customer base with loyalty to the company. Drawing in customers once is usually much easier than getting them to return time and time again–a new restaurant will attract people out of curiosity, but only if the food and service is great, will those customers bother to come back. Total Quality Management can also result in services and products with fewer defects which meet customer needs more exactly. The downside to Total Quality Management can be said to be a loss of productivity due to worker’s need to be focused on customer at all times. Training and other exercises use up time that could be spent producing value, and such a system may have negligible impact for certain positions, especially those with no customer contact, such as janitorial staff or assembly line workers for instance.
Considerations and Planning regarding Environmental Management
The goal of environmental management is to find effective ways of using limited resources. When businesses are involved, services and products are to be produced in a way which are environmentally conscious. An Environmental Management System attempts to create, reinforce and improve a sound environmental policy by means of a cycle of planning, implementation, checking (involves monitoring and taking correcting action), and review. The cycle of “plan–do–check–act” moves towards continual improvement.
Within an Environmental Management System, planning is considered an essential counterpart of environmental management. Any good policy needs to start with a solid plan which takes all potential factors into consideration and offer a way to optimize resources. Effective planning anticipates future environmental changes or alternative scenarios, and leads to preventive measures. After implementation of the plan, checking and reviewing the results always lead back to more planning for a better policy.
Health and Safety Training: Considerations and Evaluation
Some important factors need to be taken into consideration before starting with occupational health and safety training. One of the most important of these is the evaluation of the characteristics of the workers. This is done so that the program can cater to the specific needs of each worker. New employees, for example, require special attention as they need to be briefed on the company’s evacuation measures and first aid. Some existing employees also need to undergo some refresher courses from time to time to sharpen up health and safety skills learned before.
A wide variety of occupational health and safety training modules are available. It ranges from evacuation drills to illness prevention. In order to help a company choose the health and safety training module most relevant to their workplace, an objective source of information, such as their track record, should be taken into consideration. Some areas need more focus than others. Data on diseases, injuries, and other situations will help identify which areas need more focus. Insight provided from the employees themselves is crucial, seeing as they are the ones who come in contact with the existing risk factors within the workplace.