7 tips to ensure your ISO System IS your business system

Compliance systems can be a pain, all that extra work, the paperwork, the audits, the forms, and reviews. The time that you waste chasing people up to do things they don't feel they should do and of course, getting ready for the big audit from the customer or the certification body when you could be doing your real work right?

Chances are if you or someone you work with is thinking like that then you don't have a good system be it quality, health and safety, environmental, information security or a single integrated system if everyone still thinks about it as an extra, as a bolt on to the day job, then you don't understand the point of the system.

If you step back and think about the purpose of these systems, it's not the ISO9001:2015 Quality System, it's the ISO9001:2015 Quality Management System, they are all management systems, they all document how you manage things in your organsiaitons. If you have created processes that don't reflect reality in how your organisation operates then something has gone wrong somewhere. Your ISO System Management System is your Business System, they should be one and the same!

Tips to embed your system

Making the whole organisation think about them as the same thing isn't hard, as a business you just need to decide that they are and then take steps to just use your systems every day, here are some tips:

1. It is part of the Induction

Companies can be pretty terrible at inductions, for most it is either here is your desk, there is your logon and off you go or that's your supervisor they will tell you want to do. What if you took maybe a day or a few half days over the week and went through how the company works? What if you designed that induction around your management systems and included where to find things and why you do it that way?

2. Make it part of your training program

Good companies hire for attitude and train for skills, poor companies just hire. If you want your management systems to be used, you must train people on them and make it important (and interesting!) so that the training is supported by the management team and time set aside for it.

3. It is part of your annual reviews

There are more ways to do a performance review and set objectives than you can shake a stick at. However, how many of those reviews look at how the person has performed with respect to supporting your management systems? How many improvements they have contributed to it? How have they performed in internal or external audits? How many training hours have they allocated to their teams to make sure they know what to do?

4. Make it part of the agenda

Most company meetings overall are terrible, they are pretty transactional at best. However, all of the ISO standards require you to have a management review of the systems. You could do it in one big lump once a year, but that's not really integrating it into your business. If you planned your management reviews over the year, a little bit here, a little bit there month on month then they become part of the fabric of the discussion and your PDCA, Plan Do Check Adjust continuous improvement loop is quicker. If you are having an operation meeting then why not review the non-conformance registers, improvements or audits that have touched on the operations side of things. In the maintenance meetings why not review their calibration and maintenance plan adherence? When it is time to review documented procedures why not get everyone in the room who has a stake with some coffee, some cake and just get stuck in for 20 minutes?

5. Make audits a non-event

I worked with a vice president of quality once who had the view (rightly) that any audit, from major customers to ISO to internal should be a non-event. What she meant by that was that if you must rush around checking for evidence that you are using the system correctly then you are not using the system correctly. Her view was the role of the quality function was an enabler of the business, everyone should look for ways to help the organisation simplify processes and systems so they would be used. If you have high non conformance of an area, then your systems are too complex to be used.

6. Use 1 bit of A4

If your procedure goes over 1 page of A4 then it is too complex and it will never be read and so never used. Either you need to break it down, the person writing the procedure doesn't understand the process or you are combining multiple processes to 1 procedure. Either way you should review why it is so large and shrink it. People will digest most of your system in short bit size chunks than 1 massive ring binder, they are busy and not everyone likes reading, help them out a little.

7. make it easy to find things

How many systems are in a big ring binder (or two or three!) sitting on a shelf somewhere in an office gathering dust. The answer is still more than you think. Even when they are on your network drive, they can be hard to find. Sometimes you don't even know the procedure you want in your ISO system you just know a word or a phrase you are looking for, that's hard to find in a ring binder or a network drive. Modern integrated cloud-based systems like Mango make it as easy to find things as it is going to google and searching, and it is available anywhere in the world at the same time. The easier you make it to use the more people will use it.