Quality circle

A quality circle is a small group of between three and 12 people who do the same or similar work, voluntarily meeting together regularly for about one hour per week in paid time, usually under the leadership of their own supervisor, and trained to identify, analyse and solve some of the problems in their work, presenting solutions to management and, where possible, implementing solutions themselves.

The idea of the quality circle was first introduced by a number of large Japanese firms in a systematic attempt to involve all their employees, at every level, in their organisation’s drive for quality.

There are two main tasks assigned to quality circles: the identification of problems; and the suggestion of solutions. A secondary aim is to boost the morale of the group through attendance at the meetings and the formal opportunity to discuss work-related issues. Meetings are held in an organised way. A chairman is appointed on a rotating basis and an agenda is prepared. Minutes are also taken. They serve as a useful means of following up proposals and their implementation. The success of quality circles has been found to depend crucially on the amount of support they get from senior management, and on the amount of training that the participants are given in the ways and aims of the circles.

Kaoru Ishikawa, a professor at Tokyo University who died in 1989, is attributed with much of the development of the idea of quality circles. They created great excitement in the West in the 1980s, at a time when every Japanese management technique was treated with great respect. Many firms in Europe and the United States set them up, including Westinghouse and Hewlett-Packard. It was claimed at one time in the 1980s that there were as many as 10m people participating in quality circles in Japanese industry alone.

However, the method also came in for a good deal of criticism. Even Joseph Juran, one of the two American post-war germinators of the quality idea (the other was W. Edwards Deming), considered that quality circles were pretty useless if the company’s management was not trained in the more general principles of total quality management.

   Others criticised the way in which the idea was transferred from one culture to another without any attempt to tailor it to local traditions. It may, such critics suggested, be well suited to Japan’s participative workforce, but in more individualistic western societies it became a formalised hunt for people to blame for the problems that it identified. The original intention was for it to be a collective search for a solution to those problems.

   Quality circles fell from grace as they were thought to be failing to live up to their promise. A study in 1988 found that 80% of a sample of large companies in the West that had introduced quality circles in the early 1980s had abandoned them before the end of the decade. In his book “Quality: A Critical Introduction”, John Beckford quotes the example of a western retailer that took almost every wrong step in the book. These included:

• training only managers to run quality circles, and not the staff in the retail outlets who were expected to participate in them;

• setting up circles where managers appointed themselves as leaders and made their secretaries keep the minutes. This maintained the existing hierarchy which quality circles are supposed to break out of;

• expecting staff to attend meetings outside working hours and without pay;

• ignoring real problems raised by the staff (about, for example, the outlets’ opening hours) and focusing on trivia (were there enough ashtrays in the customer reception area).