Worker’s Rights: The Bedrock of True Quality Management – A May Day Reflection

As we celebrate International Workers’ Day this May 1st, it is an opportune moment to reflect on the profound connection between workers’ rights and effective quality management. The pursuit of quality cannot be separated from how we treat, empower, and respect the rights of those who create that quality daily. Today’s post examines this critical relationship, drawing from the principles I’ve advocated throughout my blog, and challenges us to reimagine quality management as fundamentally worker-centered.

The Historical Connection Between Workers’ Rights and Quality

International Workers’ Day commemorates the historic struggles and gains made by workers and the labor movement. This celebration reminds us that the evolution of quality management has paralleled the fight for workers’ rights. Quality is inherently a progressive endeavor, fundamentally anti-Taylorist in nature. Frederick Taylor’s scientific management approach reduced workers to interchangeable parts in a machine, stripping them of autonomy and creativity – precisely the opposite of what modern quality management demands.

The quality movement, from Deming onwards, has recognized that treating workers as mere cogs undermines the very foundations of quality. When we champion human rights and center those whose rights are challenged, we’re not engaging in politics separate from quality – we’re acknowledging the fundamental truth that quality cannot exist without empowered, respected workers.

Driving Out Fear: The Essential Quality Right

“No one can put in his best performance unless he feels secure,” wrote Deming thirty-five years ago. Yet today, fear remains ubiquitous in corporate culture, undermining the very quality we seek to create. As quality professionals, we must confront this reality at every opportunity.

Fear in the workplace manifests in multiple ways, each destructive to quality:

Source of Fear	Description	Impact on Quality
Competition	Managers often view anxiety generated by competition between co-workers as positive, encouraging competition for scarce resources, power, and status	Undermines collaboration necessary for system-wide quality improvements
“Us and Them” Culture	Silos proliferate, creating barriers between staff and supervisors	Prevents holistic quality approaches that span departmental boundaries
Blame Culture	Focus on finding fault rather than improving systems, often centered around the concept of “human error”	Discourages reporting of issues, driving quality problems underground

When workers operate in fear, quality inevitably suffers. They hide mistakes rather than report them, avoid innovation for fear of failure, and focus on protecting themselves rather than improving systems. Driving out fear isn’t just humane – it’s essential for quality.

Key Worker Rights in Quality Management

Quality management systems that respect workers’ rights create environments where quality can flourish. Based on workplace investigation principles, these rights extend naturally to all quality processes.

The Right to Information

In any quality system, clarity is essential. Workers have the right to understand quality requirements, the rationale behind procedures, and how their work contributes to the overall quality system. Transparency sets the stage for collaboration, where everyone works toward a common quality goal with full understanding.

The Right to Confidentiality and Non-Retaliation

Workers must feel safe reporting quality issues without fear of punishment. This means protecting their confidentiality when appropriate and establishing clear non-retaliation policies. One of the pillars of workplace equity is ensuring that employees are shielded from retaliation when they raise concerns, reinforcing a commitment to a culture where individuals can voice quality issues without fear.

The Right to Participation and Representation

The Who-What Matrix is a powerful tool to ensure the right people are involved in quality processes. By including a wider set of people, this approach creates trust, commitment, and a sense of procedural justice-all essential for quality success. Workers deserve representation in decisions that affect their ability to produce quality work.

Worker Empowerment: The Foundation of Quality Culture

Empowerment is not just a nice-to-have; it’s a foundational element of any true quality culture. When workers are entrusted with authority to make decisions, initiate actions, and take responsibility for outcomes, both job satisfaction and quality improve. Unfortunately, empowerment rhetoric is sometimes misused within quality frameworks like TQM, Lean, and Six Sigma to justify increased work demands rather than genuinely empowering workers.

The concept of empowerment has its roots in social movements, including civil rights and women’s rights, where it described the process of gaining autonomy and self-determination for marginalized groups. In quality management, this translates to giving workers real authority to improve processes and address quality issues.

Mary Parker Follett’s Approach to Quality Through Autonomy

Follett emphasized giving workers autonomy to complete their jobs effectively, believing that when workers have freedom, they become happier, more productive, and more engaged. Her “power with” principle suggests that power should be shared broadly rather than concentrated, fostering a collaborative environment where quality can thrive.

Rejecting the Great Man Fallacy

Quality regulations often fall into the trap of the “Great Man Fallacy” – the misguided notion that one person through education, experience, and authority can ensure product safety, efficacy, and quality. This approach is fundamentally flawed.

People only perform successfully when they operate within well-built systems. Process drives success by leveraging the right people at the right time making the right decisions with the right information. No single person can ensure quality, and thinking otherwise sets up both individuals and systems for failure.

Instead, we need to build processes that leverage teams, democratize decisions, and drive reliable results. This approach aligns perfectly with respecting workers’ rights and empowering them as quality partners rather than subjects of quality control.

Quality Management as a Program: Centering Workers’ Rights

Quality needs to be managed as a program, walking a delicate line between long-term goals, short-term objectives, and day-to-day operations. As quality professionals, we must integrate workers’ rights into this program approach.

The challenges facing quality today-from hyperautomation to shifting customer expectations-can only be addressed through worker empowerment. Consider how these challenges demand a worker-centered approach:

Challenge	Impact on Quality Management	Worker-Centered Approach
Advanced Analytics	Requires holistic data analysis and application	Develop talent strategies that upskill workers rather than replacing them
Hyper-Automation	Tasks previously done by humans being automated	Involve workers in automation decisions; focus on how automation can enhance rather than replace human work
Virtualization of Work	Rethinking how quality is executed in digital environments	Ensure workers have input on how virtual quality processes are designed
Shift to Resilient Operations	Need to adapt to changing risk levels in real-time	Enable employees to make faster decisions by building quality-informed judgment
Digitally Native Workforce	Changed expectations for how work is managed	Connect quality to values employees care about: autonomy, innovation, social issues

To meet these challenges, we must shift from viewing quality as a function to quality as an interdisciplinary, participatory process. We need to break down silos and build autonomy, encouraging personal buy-in through participatory quality management.

May Day as a Reminder of Our Quality Mission

As International Workers’ Day approaches, I’m reminded that our quality mission is inseparable from our commitment to workers’ rights. This May Day, I encourage all quality professionals to:

Evaluate how your quality systems either support or undermine workers’ rights
Identify and eliminate sources of fear in your quality processes
Create mechanisms for meaningful worker participation in quality decisions
Reject hierarchical quality models in favor of democratic, empowering approaches
Recognize that centering workers’ rights isn’t just ethical-it’s essential for quality

Quality management without respect for workers’ rights is not just morally questionable-it’s ineffective. The future of quality lies in approaches that are predictive, connected, flexible, and embedded. These can only be achieved when workers are treated as valued partners with protected rights and real authority.

This May Day, let’s renew our commitment to driving out fear, empowering workers, and building quality systems that respect the dignity and rights of every person who contributes to them. In doing so, we honor not just the historical struggles of workers, but also the true spirit of quality that puts people at its center.

What steps will you take this International Workers’ Day to strengthen the connection between workers’ rights and quality in your organization?

Quality, Decision Making and Putting the Human First

Quality stands in a position, sometimes uniquely in an organization, of engaging with stakeholders to understand what objectives and unique positions the organization needs to assume, and the choices that are making in order to achieve such objectives and positions.

The effectiveness of the team in making good decisions by picking the right choices depends on their ability of analyzing a problem and generating alternatives. As I discussed in my post “Design Lifecycle within PDCA – Planning” experimentation plays a critical part of the decision making process. When designing the solution we always consider:

Always include a “do nothing” option: Not every decision or problem demands an action. Sometimes, the best way is to do nothing.
How do you know what you think you know? This should be a question everyone is comfortable asking. It allows people to check assumptions and to question claims that, while convenient, are not based on any kind of data, firsthand knowledge, or research.
Ask tough questions! Be direct and honest. Push hard to get to the core of what the options look like.
Have a dissenting option. It is critical to include unpopular but reasonable options. Make sure to include opinions or choices you personally don’t like, but for which good arguments can be made. This keeps you honest and gives anyone who see the pros/cons list a chance to convince you into making a better decision than the one you might have arrived at on your own.
Consider hybrid choices. Sometimes it’s possible to take an attribute of one choice and add it to another. Like exploratory design, there are always interesting combinations in decision making. This can explode the number of choices, which can slow things down and create more complexity than you need. Watch for the zone of indifference (options that are not perceived as making any difference or adding any value) and don’t waste time in it.
Include all relevant perspectives. Consider if this decision impacts more than just the area the problem is identified in. How does it impact other processes? Systems?

A struggle every organization has is how to think through problems in a truly innovative way. Installing new processes into an old bureaucracy will only replace one form of control with another. We need to rethink the very matter of control and what it looks like within an organization. It is not about change management, on it sown change management will just shift the patterns of the past. To truly transform we need a new way of thinking.

One of my favorite books on just how to do this is Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini. In this book, the authors advocate that business must become more fundamentally human first. The idea of human ability and how to cultivate and unleash it is an underlying premise of this book.

it’s possible to capture the benefits of bureaucracy—control, consistency, and coordination—while avoiding the penalties—inflexibility, mediocrity, and apathy.
Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, Humanocracy, p. 15

The above quote really encapsulates the heart of this book, and why I think it is such a pivotal read for my peers. This books takes the core question of a bureaurcacy is “How do we get human beings to better serve the organization?”. The issue at the heart of humanocracy becomes: “What sort of organization elicits and merits the best that human beings can give?” Seems a simple swap, but the implications are profound.

Bureaucracy versus Humanocracy. Source: Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, *Humanocracy*, p. 48

I would hope you, like me, see the promise of many of the central tenets of Quality Management, not least Deming’s 8th point. The very real tendency of quality to devolve to pointless bureaucracy is something we should always be looking to combat.

Humanocracy’s central point is that by truly putting the employee first in our organizations we drive a human-centered organization that powers and thrives on innovation. Humanocracy is particularly relevant as organizations seek to be more resilient, agile, adaptive, innovative, customer centric etc. Leaders pursuing such goals seek to install systems like agile, devops, flexible teams etc. They will fail, because people are not processes. Resiliency, agility, efficiency, are not new programming codes for people. These goals require more than new rules or a corporate initiative. Agility, resilience, etc. are behaviors, attitudes, ways of thinking that can only work when you change the deep ‘systems and assumptions’ within an organization. This book discusses those deeper changes.

Humanocracy lays out seven tips for success in experimentation. I find they align nicely with Kotter’s 8 change accelerators.

Humanocracy’s Tip	Kotter’s Accelerator
Keep it Simple	Generate (and celebrate) short-term wins
Use Volunteers	Enlist a volunteer army
Make it Fun	Sustain Acceleration
Start in your own backyard	Form a change vision and strategic initiatives
Run the new parallel with the old	Enable action by removing barriers
Refine and Retest	Sustain acceleration
Stay loyal to the problem	Create a Sense of Urgency around a Big Opportunity

Comparison to Kotter’s Eight Accelerators for Change

Management’s Job

In episode 48 of the Deming Len’s podcast, the host refers back to Deming’s last interview, “Dr. Deming: ‘Management Today Does Not Know What Its Job Is‘”

I’ve written recently about driving fear out of the organization. Without a doubt I think this is the number one task for us. True North for the quality profession.

The source of innovation is freedom. All we have—new knowledge, invention—comes from freedom. Somebody responsible only to himself has the heaviest responsibility. “You cannot plan to make a discovery,” Irving Langmuir said. Discoveries and new knowledge come from freedom. When somebody is responsible only to himself, [has] only himself to satisfy, then you’ll have invention, new thought, now product, new design, new ideas.
Dr. W. Edwards Deming

Drive Out Fear on International Workers Day

Happy International Workers Day. Let’s celebrate by Driving Out Fear!

Thirty-five years ago Deming wrote that “no one can put in his best performance unless he feels secure.” Unfortunately, today we still live in a corporate world where fear and management by fear is ubiquitous. That fear is growing after more than a year of a global pandemic. As quality professionals we must deal with it at every opportunity.

Fear undermines quality, productivity, and innovation. The existence of fear leads to a vicious downward spiral.

Some sources of fear include:

Competition: Many managers use competition to instill fear. Competition is about winners and losers. Success cannot exist without failure. Managers deem the anxiety generated by competition between co-workers a good thing as they compete for scarce resources, power and status. Therefore, management encourage competition between individuals, between groups and departments and between business units.
“Us and Them” Culture: The “us and them” culture that predominates in so many organizations proliferated by silos. Includes barriers between staff and supervisors.
Blame Culture: Fear predominates in a blame culture. Blame culture can often center around enshrining the idea of human error.

We drive out fear by building a culture centered on employee well-being. This is based on seven factors.

Factor	Means	Obtained by
Responsibility	Well defined responsibilities and ownership	The opportunity an employee has to provide input into decision making in his department An individual employees’ own readiness to set high personal standards An individual employee’s interest in challenging work assignments The opportunity an employee has to improve skills and capabilities Excellent career advancement opportunities The organization’s encouragement of problem-solving and innovative thinking
Management Competence	Managers trained with skills that lend themselves to contributing to the work of their team ensures that they will be looked to for help. Managers need to be able to guide.	Direct Supervisor/Manager Leadership Abilities Management is engaged and leads by example (Gemba walks) Management by Facts
Consideration	When managers act as if employees have no feelings and just expect them to do their work as if they are robots, it can make employees uneasy. Such behavior makes them feel detached and merely a tool to carry out an end. In such environments, many times the only times employees hear from the manager is when something goes well or really bad. In either case, the perception could be that the manager has mood swings and that also adds to the employee’s insecurity. They may feel reluctant to talk to their manager for fear he is in one of his bad moods.	Senior Management’s sincere interest in employee well-being An individual employee’s relationship with their supervisor Open and effective communication Trust in management and co-workers
Cooperation	The feeling that every person is on their own to look out for their interest is a sad state to be in. Yet when everyone has a fear that the other workers will take advantage of them or make them look bad at the first opportunity, a selfish and insecure environment will result. Employees should be able to work together for the benefit of the company. They should focus on group goals in addition to their personal goals, recognizing that individually there will be failures, but that the whole is more important than the individual parts.	Trust Well trained employees Collaboration as a process Organizational culture (psychological safety) Hire and promote the right behaviors & traits to match the culture
Feedback	Information that is given back to the employee regarding their performance on the job.	Know what is expected of them (clear job descriptions) Effective processes for timely feedback Recognition Know their opinion matters
Information	Transparency is critical. When employees know nothing about how a company is doing in terms of where they should be, it is a source of uneasiness. Without that knowledge, for all they know the company could be doing very poorly and that could be a bad thing for everyone. When they have a better sense of where the company is in the scheme of their objectives set by management, it helps them feel more secure. That is not to say it is the news being good or bad that affects their security, but rather the fact that they actually have the news.	Strategy and Mission — especially the freedom and autonomy to succeed and contribute to an organization’s success Organizational Culture and Core/Shared Values Feel that their job is important
Stability	Employees feel more secure when their role does not change frequently and they understand what tomorrow will mean.	Job Content — the ability to do what I do best Availability of Resources to Perform the Job Effectively Career development – opportunities to learn and grow

Driving out Fear

Norm Howe, a colleague in the ASQ and a great guy, wrote on his company’s blog “It Doesn’t Make Any Difference How Nice the Boss Is” and I want to strongly recommend that people read it.

Norm tells an engaging story where he shares a formative experience on the value of driving out fear. He then explains that we as managers grew up in these cultures and it requires work to build a new culture.

He hits on a great note, managers are part of the cultures they grew up in. We are like trees with many rings, and it can be very difficult just to change that.

I love story-sharing like this.