Introduction
The Baldrige Program is a national program designed in a public-private partnership to educate organizations on performance excellence and improve the performance of organizations within the U.S. The program is funded by the Baldrige Foundation, which is composed of leaders from different U.S. organizations. The program includes a complex of assessment tools and criteria required to estimate the organization’s current situation and the company’s signature product – the Baldrige Framework for Excellence. According to information provided by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST, 2019), more than one thousand organizations annually use the Baldrige Excellence Framework. Among these organizations, 124 Baldrige Award winners serve as national role models in all areas of the economy (NIST, 2019). The economic evaluation of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program reports that the ratio of benefits from the program to the U.S. economy is 820 to 1 (NIST, 2019). One of the most common areas of the economy that gets significant benefits from the program’s application in the healthcare system and hospitals.
Critical Thinking
The company’s main product, the Baldrige Program Framework for Excellence, is a booklet that provides valuable information on leadership and management practices. The booklet is designed to educate the organization and its’ leaders on performance excellence by uncovering principles and strategies vital for organizational performance and providing information on cases of successful application of performance-driven practices. The information is separated into seven categories that compose the organizational profile: leadership, strategy, customers, workforce, operations, results, a system of measurements, analysis, and knowledge management. The program implies that integrating these key elements and the organization’s core values and inner concepts promotes the organization’s excellence.
Although the program is more driven by the manufacturing and service-oriented organization, organizations from other vital areas of the economy like education and healthcare are frequently met in the list of Award winners. Moreover, about 24% of Award winners represent small businesses with less than 500 employees, emphasizing that the program applies to organizations of any size and the size does not determine results (Baldrige Foundation, n.d.). Applying this to the aspect of achieving customer and workforce engagement, one could say that the same principles that work in small businesses could be applied to bigger companies. The results from the Award winners suggest that aligning individual workforce plans to the organizational goals and objectives increases workforce engagement, as shown in the case of Howard Community College (Baldrige Foundation, 2021). The case of Mary Greeley Medical Center illustrated in the Foundation’s coverage of Award recipients (2021) showed that the key elements to the customers’ engagement are communication and responsiveness of the employees.
In 2019, there were six recipients of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, three of them were classified as a non-profit organizations, and the other three were from education and healthcare areas. Comparing the two winners from different industries, the Mary Greeley Medical Center and Howard Community College show that the award winner organizations share similarities and differences. In both cases, the organization’s goals became closely related to the individual performance objectives of employees, which are based on the organization’s mission, vision, and values. However, in the case of Howard Community College, the recommendations for future strategy are provided by the county’s Commission on the Future. What made them both award-winning organizations is the impressive results of applying the program’s principles that allowed the organizations to grow in different areas simultaneously.
Debrief
The research shows that tools like the Baldrige Program Framework offer many growth opportunities for organizations that are willing to take action to increase their growth. As the framework applies to organizations of different sizes from different industries, one could say that the core principles for the excellence of the company’s activities are the same in various areas of the economy. The program provides a working framework that is proven to be reliable by previous practices. In my opinion, it is helpful that the award winner organizations present role models for the organizations in industries vital to society, like education and healthcare.
References
Baldrige Foundation. (n.d.) Baldrige impact for small businesses. Baldrige Foundation. Web.
Baldrige Foundation. Journal of performance excellence 2020-2021. Web.
NIST. (2019). About Baldrige. NIST. Web.