Envisioning a Culture for Quality

The Envisioning a Culture for Quality™ is an interactive team exercise that raises awareness of behaviors that contribute to high-quality service while building participants’ consensus decision-making skills. What is Envisioning a Culture for Quality?

Envisioning a Culture for Quality is an interactive team exercise that raises awareness of behaviors that contribute to high-quality service while building participants’ consensus decision-making skills. Developed by Dr. Robert A. Cooke, the exercise challenges participants to rank order 24 behavioral norms in terms of their impact on service quality.

What It’s Best Used For

• Developing Supervisors and Managers: Training frontline supervisors, department heads, senior executives, and organizational change agents to align their leadership habits with high-quality service values.
• Evaluating and Proving Team Synergy: Measuring whether a corporate group can successfully build upon individual knowledge to arrive at an optimized, collaborative final decision under pressure.
• Preparing Teams for Culture Change: Priming a company workforce, specific department, or team for major continuous improvement initiatives, service overhauls, or structural culture transformations.
• Auditing Existing Behavioral Norms: Helping leaders understand the service quality implications of their current company climate by pairing the exercise with the companion Organizational Culture Inventory® (OCI).
• Upgrading Service Training Programs: Serving as an engaging centerpiece activity, an interactive icebreaker, or a pre-test/post-test metric during extended internal customer service training workshops.
• Honing Team Problem-Solving Tracks: Coaching existing employees on how to execute multi-tier logical deductions, debate operational priorities constructively, and optimize group decision-making processes.

How does Envisioning work?

Solutions to the exercise are developed first on an individual basis and then by groups.  Individual and team solutions are compared to the ranking and rationale based on the results of research carried out on over 350 organizations, departments and work groups.  Comparisons between participants’ individual ranking and the Culture for Quality Ranking indicate how well they are exercising their knowledge, skills, and experience with respect to
customer service and complex problem solving. Comparisons between participants’ individual scores and their team’s score indicates whether they were able to achieve synergy by fully using and building on their collective knowledge and skills.

The exercise takes approximately 2 to 2½ hours to complete, including scoring and debriefing.

Applications

The Envisioning a Culture for Quality can be used as an icebreaker, central activity, pretest/post-test, or follow-up activity for programs focusing on:

• Service quality
• Problem solving and decision making
• Team development

The exercise can also be used as a tool for:

• Developing supervisors and managers
• Understanding the implications of an organization’s current behavioral norms (as measured by the Organizational Culture Inventory®) with respect to service quality
• Preparing an organization for culture change and improvement

Who should experience Envisioning a Culture for Quality?

Envisioning a Culture for Quality is particularly appropriate for supervisors, managers, executives, organizational change agents, and organization development professionals.

The Envisioning a Culture for Quality is a registered trademark of Human Synergistics®, Inc.