Common Quality Metrics in the Social Services

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The graphic to the right shows the most common metrics used in quality work in manufacturing and service industries across the globe, according to the Global Quality Survey administered by the American Society for Quality. (The full report is available here, but it will cost you your email address so ASQ can market to you).

In both sectors, the most common metric was customer satisfaction. In the service sector, employee satisfaction and the percentage that services were compliant with some standard were also common metrics. In manufacturing, on-time delivery was also measured most commonly.

I have three reactions to this figure.

1) In the social service world, the metric internal and external stakeholders want to know about is whether  clients got better. This is a far more difficult thing to measure than on-time delivery. The quality manager that can show this data convincingly is worth her wait in gold. Get quality people together in the social services and this is what they talk about: "In your organization, how do you measure...?"

2) The very high percentages obtained in this survey shows that there is some agreement on what can and should be measured in the quality world. Manufacturing folks especially seem to agree that lots of things can and should be measured routinely.

3) Soon, we will have data from the National Survey of Quality Professionals in the Social Services to help answer the question, what are the most common quality metrics in the social services. Stay tuned!


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