The quality objectives that keep getting written up at audit, and how I would rewrite them

If you look after the quality system day to day, quality objectives are probably something you set once, put in the manual and dust off before the audit. They are also one of the most common findings I see written against 9001 clause 6.2, and it is almost never because they are missing.

The usual problem is objectives like "improve customer satisfaction" or "maintain high quality". They sound fine in a policy meeting, but the auditor will ask four things straight away: how do you measure it, what is the target, who owns it, and what have you done about it this year. If the answer to any of those is a pause, that is the finding.

What works is boring and specific. "Reduce customer complaints to under 5 per quarter by June, owned by the operations manager, reviewed monthly at the production meeting" survives that conversation. So does "On time delivery at 95 percent or better, tracked weekly from the dispatch report". Each one tells the auditor where the data lives, so they can go and sample it.

The part people forget is the link back. Each objective should trace to something in the quality policy or a risk you identified, and the results should turn up as an input at management review. If the objectives never appear in the review minutes, that gets noticed even when the objectives themselves are well written.

A quick check you can do this week: take each objective and try to show someone the last three data points for it in under a minute. If you cannot, fix that before the surveillance audit does it for you.

Some worked examples across different functions here: https://auditworkshop.com/blog/example-quality-objectives-that-pass-an-audit