The Quest for Sustainable Excellence in Goldis

European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Excellence Model

The European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Excellence Model, is a self-assessment framework for measuring the strengths and areas for improvement of an organisation across all of its activities. The term ‘excellence’ is used because the Excellence Model focuses on what an organisation does, or could do, to provide an excellent service or product to its customers, service users or stakeholders.

It is non-prescriptive and provides a broad and coherent set of assumptions about what is required for a good organisation and its management. Each organisation can use it in its own way to manage and develop improvement, under the control of those who use the methods rather than an external evaluator.

Goldis is  pleased to announce that it  is conducting a comprehensive self-assessment of its management and organizational structure based on EFQM guidelines.

Excellence means taking a long term holistic view. It requires positive leadership, emotional involvement, walking the talk, gaining employee and customer trust, and being open to self-assessment and continuous improvement.

Some of the benefits of self-assessment are as follows:

• A way of helping "leaders" to prioritise action based on facts and identified needs.
• A way to pull existing initiatives together and to focus improvement efforts.
• A way of comparative benchmarking and sharing best practices.
• A way of demonstrating long term commitment and consistency of purpose.
• A way of involving all staff, through ownership of agreed actions and results.

This figure illustrates EFQM framework:

Source: EFQM Homepage available at: http://www.efqm.org/en/