In a recent webinar we held in conjunction with the Chartered Quality Institute (CQI) Louise Ebrey and Peter Emms explored the intersection of culture, wellbeing, and quality work, something striking emerged from the pre-session survey: quality professionals already know their work impacts people's stress levels. What's less clear is what to do about it.
The survey revealed that quality activities—particularly assurance and audit work—create moderate to significant stress for people across organisations.
More concerningly, respondents recognised that when people's wellbeing suffers, their ability to engage with quality work drops dramatically, and the effectiveness of quality initiatives plummets alongside it.
The complexity facing quality professionals today is staggering. Survey responses painted a picture of multiple, compounding challenges:
Each of these would be demanding on its own. But organisations rarely experience change in isolation.
One quality professional described their challenge as "achieving consistent quality assurance and control across multi-disciplinary marine repair and fabrication operations—especially when projects involve subcontractors, offshore equipment, and varying international classification standards." Another faced "globalising the QMS from country systems into a harmonised global approach during times of change within the business, redundancies and freezes on hiring."
The pattern is clear: technical quality challenges are colliding with human capacity constraints at the worst possible moment.
When asked how stakeholders and users felt about these changes, the responses were telling:
"Generally positive but high workload and limited time."
"They see it as an added extra to their day job."
"Not knowing how it will impact them. Change to the status quo. Feeling of more paperwork."
Even quality teams themselves felt the strain. One respondent admitted they were "not excited but it needs doing," while another observed a "mixed acceptance for the different departments and even individuals within the department."
Perhaps most poignantly, one person shared: "I feel excited about the work and think it will in the long run streamline systems and make work easier for colleagues. I sometimes feel that I am being left to complete the implementation instead of team approach."
This isn't resistance for resistance's sake. It's human beings trying to protect their psychological safety during periods of uncertainty.
To understand why change challenges wellbeing so profoundly, Peter Emms introduced a framework for thinking about how different organisational cultures create different types of "safe space."
Flow spaces embrace diversity and individual working styles—think creative teams or responsive customer service environments. They accept difference but can feel overwhelming when certainty is needed.
Container spaces bring regulation and consistency—essential for high-risk situations like financial centres or healthcare environments. They build certainty but can feel constraining to individual expression.
Filtered spaces sit in between, allowing preferred ways of working while permitting some individual variation—the reality for most organisations most of the time.
The challenge during change? It pushes organisations into flow spaces as new behaviours and ways of working are introduced. Surface rules—systems, processes, policies—change quickly. But the deeper, unconscious cultural rules can't keep up. This creates tension that people feel but often don't understand.
As Peter explained: "When we introduce change, we're not just asking people to act differently, we're asking them to rebuild their sense of safety, their sense of trust and identity."
Here's what quality professionals need to understand: people aren't just navigating your quality system implementation. They're simultaneously processing:
We talk about "change curves"—how people move through denial, anger, acceptance, and commitment. But these curves compound. You might be accepting one change while feeling angry about another, and that frustration can send you straight back into denial about the first change.
Louise’s personal story illustrated this powerfully. After returning from bereavement leave following her husband's sudden death, she returned to work only to discover a restructure affecting most of her team—with no advance warning. The HR system categorised her time off as "sick leave" for a mental health issue, completely missing the reality of her bereavement. The policy chose process over people at precisely the moment when human recognition mattered most.
She reflected: "We can't take on board everything that's going on for everybody in their life. We can't manage everybody's individual trauma and their personal change. But as improvement and quality professionals, we can look at how all these change cycles of our projects interact, and we can acknowledge that everybody's going through those different journeys."
We explore what Quality Professionals can do to change this narrative, improve wellbeing and make quality more effective in their organisations in part 2.
