Introduction
Customer satisfaction is a goal that every organization strives to realize. The success of an organization depends on how well it satisfies its customers. All the practices set by the company that helps to ensure that the organization fully meets the needs of the customers are referred to as total quality management or TQM. According to the American Society for Quality (1), total quality management entails continuous measurement and improvement of the extent to which the organization fulfills the requirements of the customers.
TQM employs strategies and effective communication within the organization to incorporate the quality principles into the culture and activities of the organization to ensure that all the activities are geared towards satisfying the customers. Total quality management is a long-term success strategy that a company seeks to achieve through customer satisfaction.
In successful total quality management, all members of the organization work together to improve the quality of products, services, and the culture within the organization to achieve total customer satisfaction (O’Donovan 39). All members of the organization need to be taught on the ways of ensuring total quality management within the organization.
The objective of this report is to present the concept of total quality management as it is portrayed within Dubai Autism Center, a nonprofit making organization in UAE that seeks to help children suffering from autism spectrum disorders and to teach people on how to understand the infected and help them.
The culture within the Dubai Autism Center
The culture of Dubai Autism Center (DAC) is to get all members involved in offering accredited programs that will offer the necessary support to the children that are living under the oppression of Autism. DAC trains its professionals to make them competent in dealing with those children with Autism and to understand the needs of such children. All members must work to make DAC an internationally recognized center that offers consultancy about Autism within the United Arab Emirates region.
The organization seeks to create awareness about Autism and tries to get all the infected integrated into society. The DAC community or members believe in teamwork and thorough training of all members to make them competent enough to be able to serve the community. DAC is community centered and specifically focuses on children that are suffering from Autism.
Although it is a not for profit organization, it is devoted to offering quality services to the community by offering support to the Autism infected children. To achieve this, the DAC members are devoted to working together towards achieving the corporate goals. In other words, DAC believes in cooperative teamwork to realize its goals.
To ensure that the major goal of offering excellent support to the Autism infected is realized, DAC applies several strategies. These strategies are goals that every member should be committed to achieving, and they define the paradigm of the organization. Firstly, DAC fraternity is devoted to providing educational facilities and centers for the children suffering from Autism (DAC 1). The team also seeks to mobilize the local authorities to come up with more specialist services to help Autism infected children.
The organization also publishes books and leaflets aimed at helping people to read and understand better the concept of Autism. DAC encourages research about Autism that will help people gain a deep understanding of the disorder. Other goals include training programs, consultancy services, libraries, operating a helpline to enable parents to address the issue to the organization, among others. All members believe in and work to achieve these goals of the organization.
The DAC also organizes an annual Autism awareness month to create awareness to the people in the United Arab Emirates and the rest of the world about Autism and encouraging them to take part in helping the infected children (DAC 1).
The organization also has a strong organizational structure that is headed by the DAC chairman HH sheik Hamdan followed in the hierarchy by the managing director Ahmad Bin Visas and their subordinate. It is the culture of the organization for all members to respect the authority in the higher and lower hierarchy. This will help the organization achieve its goals and objectives (Harris 319).
Total quality barriers faced by Dubai Autism Center. Why are the barriers to quality?
The total quality management of the DAC is focused on measuring the extent to which the needs of the children suffering from Autism and those of the community regarding Autism are met.
The organization has tried to satisfy the society expectation in dealing with Autism through providing support to the children suffering from Autism, organizing awareness campaign every year, providing specialized schools and institution for the children with Autism, offering consultation services to professional dealing with Autism and training specialists in the field among others (DAC 1).
However, the organization is facing some challenges in implementing total quality management. These challenges are acting as barriers to the total quality management of the organization.
Firstly, the organization is a not for profit organization and it relies on donors, grants and well-wishers for funding. As a result, the organization may not have enough funds to deal with all case as of Autism in the United Arab Emirates and other regions of interest. Creating awareness is a costly event and may not be carried out frequently throughout the year. Currently, the organization is doing the awareness campaigns for one month in a year.
This might not be able to reach out to all the people targeted. Many people are, therefore, still unaware of how to deal with cases of autism that is affecting most of their children. Lack of enough funding is a barrier to the total quality offered by DAC because it makes it impossible to fully achieve some goals of ensuring quality services to the community.
The organization is committed to providing quality information to the community regarding Autism and to provide support to the infected children. For instance, they provide educational facilities and such like. This practice requires a lot of funds which may not be available always.
To reach out to the un-reached communities, the organization requires people to volunteer. Being a nonprofit making organization, DAC is not in a position to employ much personnel to aid in the execution of its responsibilities. Instead, the organization has a volunteering program which calls for people to volunteer in helping the community deal with Autism. The volunteers are limited, and therefore, there is a challenge in delivering quality service to the community.
According to DAC (1), though the company is willing to train people on total quality management in serving the community, people are not available. Few volunteers may not be able to deliver quality that can be delivered by a big group. Volunteers at Dubai Autism Center are important in quality service delivery because they take big responsibilities of creating awareness to the community about Autism. DAC advertises volunteering opportunities in their website but has not been able to get enough volunteers within the United Arab Emirates.
The organization has an integrated system aimed at letting the employees know the vision and mission of the organization, but the big challenge is that employees are few because the organization largely depends on volunteers. The system also ensures total employees involvement in the affairs of the business.
The volunteers are also involved in the mission and vision of the organization and are trained on how to execute the responsibility of the organization. Lack of enough volunteers affects the organization because it incurs a lot of cost in training a few volunteers who may not be enough to cover the targeted region.
Characteristics of a quality culture about Dubai Autism Center
In business, quality means offering goods and services that satisfy the needs of the customers. Quality culture in an organization will involve all the employees to work towards satisfying the needs of the customers (O’Donovan 38). Quality culture in an organization ensures there is effective communication in an organization. Form of communication may be interpersonal, inter or intragroup communication or communication at the external levels of the organization.
Effective communication enhances teamwork and hence, the success of the organization. The other aspect of quality culture is better for better movement. According to Harris (315), the organization should be focused on becoming better always. There should also be created within the organization that enables the organization to be unique in the way it delivers services.
Also, the management of the organization should have a total commitment to the mission and vision of the organization. This will commit the whole organization to the realization of its goals. The mindset of the organization (the members) should be changing to cultivate innovation (Goetsch & Stanley 27). This will move the organization to the desired level.
For DAC, the culture is of good quality in terms of commitment of the management and moving from better to better. However, there has not been fully effective communication at external levels. Creativity and innovation have been but a lot ought to be done to improve them. In my opinion, to improve the quality of the culture of DAC, the team needs to come up with more creative means of creating awareness and raising funds.
Though it is not a profit making organization, there is a need to devise mechanisms of raising funds rather than relying entirely on donations. They can publish more books and sell them at a friendly cost. The publicity of volunteering opportunities should focus on the most available groups like continuing university students who could spend their vacations in volunteer activities. This will improve culture quality.
Conclusion
The total quality management of every organization needs close attention because it defines the relationship between the organization and the group it is serving. The culture of the organization determines the extent to which the total quality management is realized. It should, therefore, be directed towards serving the customers or the community to the best.
Works cited
American society for quality (ASQ). Total Quality Management. Milwaukee: ASQ. 2006. Web.
Dubai Autism Center (DAC). Our mission, our vision, our goals. Dubai: dubaiautismcenter, 2006. Web.
Goetsch, David & Stanley Davis. Implementing Total Quality. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1995.
Harris, Stanley G. Organizational Culture and Individual Sensemaking: A Schema-Based Perspective. Organization Science, Vol. 5, (3): pp. 309-321, 1994.
O’Donovan, Gabrielle. The Corporate Culture Handbook: How to Plan, Implement andMeasure a Successful Culture Change Program. Raheny: The Liffey Press, 2006. Print.