Many firms have dramatically improved their competitiveness by introducing Quality Circles. However, unless a culture of Total Quality Management is first implemented, such initiatives are usually short lived. To make effective use of this radically different technique, managers must readjust their attitudes towards the workforce and the entire process of corporate management.
Revised in 2025 | David Hutchins
Nobody should ignore the dramatic achievements of companies, in Britain and around the world, which have successfully introduced the concept of Quality Circles. There are no countries of significance where companies have not experimented with the concept even if they might not have achieved the expected results. When this happens the reasons usually lie in the implementation process and not in the concept itself. (Reference my recent book Self Managing Work Groups).
The idea may seem foreign in Britain. But in many respects, there is an element of de ja vu.
Industrially, Craftsmanship originated as a factory system in the UK following the Industrial revolution. It is founded on the belief that the Craftsman is responsible for the quality of his or her own work. This was the culture of Business Management in the UK prior to World War1. The foreman or supervisor was the leading craftsman and held in high respect both by management and the workforce.
Tragically, most of our craftsmen were conscripted into the Army, dressed in Khaki Uniforms and buried in the poppy fields of France.
Had that not happened the route to Quality Circles would have been an easy one. Instead, we copied the American so called ‘Scientific Management’ approach where management manages and people do! In the view of the author, it is anything but scientific and results in industrial slavery. This is a strong view and of course it is not always as bad as that, but it is not good from a humanistic point of view. We spend a third of our lives at work if we are lucky enough to have a job and we should work on making satisfying, enjoyable and rewarding. It gives us our self esteem and can earn the esteem of others.
Quality Circles are based on the ‘Craftsmanship’ concept but on its own it is uneconomic when compared with the American mass production system. Professor Ishikawa postulated that maybe you could bring back Craftsmanship but to groups of people rather than individually. The UK could easily have done that had our workforce not been virtually completely destroyed in World War 1. The important thing is that it is not alien to our culture, it is or was our culture!
In the 1980s there was an upsurge of interest in Quality Circles and an increasing number of British firms took an interest as a means of improving their corporate competitiveness – and the interest in the concept grew rapidly in retail and service businesses, as well as in manufacturing, the area where the idea was first applied.
That upsurge of interest might now be dismissed as nothing more than the reaction of beleaguered managements in a growingly hostile economic climate given the dramatic Quality Revolution in Japan. Unfortunately, two factors smothered that growth.
What they did not appreciate was that Quality Circles were not a stand alone concept. Unless they are embedded into a receptive culture their long tern survival is very unlikely. The most likely culture is a Total Quality Management (TQM) culture where they originated in the first place. The late Professor Ishikawa acknowledged in Japan to be the ‘father of Quality Circles’ always said that Quality Circles could not survive in any other culture than that which develops out of TQM. In my experience this has always proved to be the case.
Consequently, one by one Quality Circles initiatives implemented by these band wagon chasing consultancies failed. Of course, the failures attracted the attention of the media who seemed to take great delight in making all this public. Consequently, and with the timing coinciding with the start of the recession, interest did not return after the recession was over. It appeared to be a case of ‘we tried it once and it did not work’. Sadly, they were wrong. It does work and produces stunning results when implemented correctly but industrialists rarely attempt the same thing twice. The temptation is to move on and look for new and different panaceas.
Today any concept which appears to offer a path to higher productivity, better product quality and more harmonious labour relations might seem worth trying. Undoubtedly, present conditions are making managements increasingly receptive to ideas which might appear to improve competitive position and are easy to implement such as Six Sigma, Lean, Scrum, Agile etc. All of them individually can produce modest results but even these initiatives are usually short lived as Quality Circles appear to have been in the West at least. industrialists seek to find what they hope will be a silver bullet! Unfortunately, no such bullet has yet been discovered.
The introduction of a quality circle programme certainly calls for readjustment of conventional management attitudes, which, however enlightened, tend to be rooted in the
idea that the workforce must be told what to do. Nevertheless. the benefits which stem from the introduction of Quality Circles are tangible, substantial, and proven,
For example, when the UK first experimented with the concept in the late 1970s, at Rolls-Royce’s Aero Division in Derby, savings in 30 months amounted to £525,000. (The items contributing to this total include a reduction in defective welds on
turbine blades from 24% to 1.8%. Investigation showed a need to amend the weld parameters and increase the ‘slope-out’ (the time taken for the electron welding beam to decay) from 8 seconds to 12 seconds. Savings from November 1979 to August 1980 came to £57, 760. (worth£360,000 pounds today) Machining problems on turbine blades, leading to a scrap rate of 4%, were also investigated.
They were rectified by clearing up the workspace and reorganizing the layout of equipment. Scrap was reduced to 0.5% as a result for an annual saving of £26.000.
The savings can range from huge sums in large companies to relatively small amounts that make a large difference to comparatively small firms. To give other examples of cost
savings achieved through Quality Circles: reduction of time lost through conflicting job instructions in one company was worth £165,454; on time lost in locating precision tools, the saving was £71,363; elimination of oil leaks contaminating materials was worth £1,890; while tinplate finish problems were solved at a saving of £78,000. (all these values are the original numbers in 1978)
As mentioned, the original development of Quality Circles, took place in Japan where they were adopted as an essential part of that country’s plan – fuelled by urgent economic need – to become a front-rank industrial nation. The Japanese success in this respect is today abundantly clear – yet the very idea of a Japanese car on British roads would have been considered a joke 60 or so years ago and now both China and India are following the same path using the same concepts as emerged in Japan. Today’s large Japanese market share, however, rests in large measure on an undeniable reputation for product quality and reliability now being emulated throughout the Far East.
Of course, no single concept or management policy has been responsible for the extraordinary success of Japan. But the employment of Quality Circles on a massive scale
throughout Japanese industry in a culture of TQM has undoubtedly played a very significant role. The concept is also making its mark today in countries as diverse as Bangladesh, China, Brazil, Korea, and India, and in firms such as TATA Steel and Motherson with their roots in India are spreading through their operations world-wide – which suggests that the concept is widely applicable and not rooted in the characteristics of a particular national culture.
Like most good ideas, the basic concept of the quality circle is very simple – deceptively so, in fact. Six or eight workers from a shop or department meet regularly under the
leadership of a foreman or section head to examine work problems that affect the quality of output, and to recommend solutions to those problems. This simple structure and seemingly obvious function make it easy to dismiss Quality Circles as just another variation on existing techniques – committees, suggestion schemes and all the other well-known and well-tried methods of seeking to improve quality and raise productivity. In fact, the quality circle differs radically from all other soft skills. both in concept and in manner of operation.
The Quality Circle are best implemented as the last stage of a corporate total business wide initiative commencing at the highest level (Stairs are best swept starting from the top!). At that level the work required is referred to as the implementation of ‘Hosh Kanri’. The objective of Hoshin Kanri or ‘Management by Policy’ as an alternative name, is to create an organisational culture in which everyone from the Executive through to and including the workforce is working collectively to make their organisation the best in its business.
Following the establishment of the Executive as being the North Pole of the compass in this respect, the initiative is taken down layer by layer to the direct employees. It must not be taken down a layer until support is fully established at the level above. Some might be frustrated to learn this but if it is carried out correctly very substantial savings will be made at the higher levels which implies that the implementation process can be self-funding and almost always is when implemented by experienced specialists.
Eventually it reaches the level of Direct employees and draws directly on the knowledge and skills at workplace level – an unfamiliar approach for many!
Even more surprisingly, once it reaches the direct reports, it can become a bottom-up development and, can eventually become entirely self-directing operation – yet still a full part of the organization. This self-directing. bottom-up approach is crucial to success; a clear grasp of the implications is essential for any manager wishing to introduce the concept, since the approach is diametrically opposite to the received wisdom of much Western management policy.
Resistance to change! , The doctrines of so called ‘scientific’ management where ‘management manages and people do’ die hard and the worker is often seen as little more than an extension of the’ machine or desk. At the same time, responsibility is removed from the foreman and passed to specialists – quality engineers, work study engineers, production engineers, inspectors, and so on. Even labour relations are handled by the personnel department.
Quality Circles succeed in tapping this huge unused resource of knowledge and skill, which resides in every workforce, and do so in a way which draws on and fosters the very real human need or job satisfaction.
Nobody really wants to feel that the firm he works for produces poor quality products, and pride of achievement in helping to improve the company’s image is important.
Why do Quality Circles work? Because – unlike so many other techniques – they involve people in the management of the work that they do
Behavioural Scientists who are usually academics, are not usually the best people to question about this.
Sure they can come up with ideas that suggest that you sprinkle magic dust and everyone dances of into the moonlight. There is nothing wrong with their ideas but unless they have been themselves wire brushed at the coal face of repetitive industrial work, they can postulate but cannot appreciate the realities that the workforce confronts. The concept of Quality Circles does embrace all of the ‘right brained’ soft skills advocated by the Behavioural scientist but the ‘left brained’ aspect is equally important. Quality Circles are usually very down-to-earth people and call a spade a spade. So are their supervisors and managers. In many cases, they are not interested in hearing about the soft skills. Their question is ‘what should I do different from what I am doing now’. They need the practical aspects. The Basic Tools, the support structure, monitoring, sharing results. Focus on these and in many cases the soft skills will take care of themselves.
Management commitment, careful preparation of the groundwork and a gradual introduction without fanfares are the key factors in their successful establishment in a business. The basic techniques of the quality circle, moreover, are applicable to any situation where people work together, and are as relevant in a bank or hotel as they are in a foundry or factory. Quality Circles are not, of course, an instant remedy for every industrial ill. But their value has been demonstrated time and again. No firm has anything to fear from Quality Circles properly applied: a great many companies have much to gain but! Consider TQM first!.
More on this can be found in David Hutchins latest book Self Managing Workgroups which is now part of his trilogy including ‘Hoshin Kanri – the Strategic Approach to Continuous Improvement’ and ‘Quality Beyond Borders’ – An International Award winning book pointing out ‘ Quality Universal’!
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