Planning the TQS Journey (2) First things first

Now that you know what you do to help employers, you can begin to ask yourself the really important question.

What difference do your interventions make to employers?

If you did nothing would the employer be better off? You hope not, but how do you know?

Is the employer more profitable or, in the case of public sector organisations, is the organisation achieving more of its objectives, as a result of your interventions?

If you don’t know, you need to find out.

Set up the audit trail when you first begin to work with an employer.

Think about business benefits. When an employer chooses to work with you, what’s in it for the employer?

Think about key performance indicators – business performance indicators, that is.

It’s hard work establishing the right KPIs but you need to do this so that you’ll have something to write about when you get to the stage of working on your TQS application. You’ll need the answers to help you with A0 and A5.

Start working on these issues now.

Be prepared to work on your system for several months before you seek certification. You will need to show that you are actually identifying business benefits, setting performance indicators and measuring your success.