
Building strong quality cultures and capabilities in organisations

Advocacy and fostering strong relationships are essential for building and integrating quality capability throughout an organisation. Fiona Payne, Senior Quality Manager at CapGemini, Lee Major, Deputy Director, Quality and Regulatory Assurance Division at UKHSA and Chris Achillea, HSEQ Director at Sodexo share their insights on the integral role quality professionals can play in achieving a quality culture and embedding quality capabilities to drive organisational performance.
A key insight from Quality Live 2024 was the crucial role people play in an organisation’s success and how quality professionals can positively influence company culture, which is a product of values and behaviours. As quality professionals we have the skills to influence these behaviours when we support root cause analysis, coach a peer on a new skill or facilitate a group to identify improvements.
Building a learning organisation
A learning organisation has a culture that embraces compliance – and performance – evidenced by the following beliefs and behaviours:
- staff are proactive
- staff have a zero-defect mindset
- lessons learned are shared throughout the organisation
- assurance is seen as vital to meet regulations and standards
- processes are actively managed and maintained by the teams that use them
A blame culture can set in with negative beliefs and behaviours when quality is seen as compliance only. For example:
- processes cover everything in graphic detail
- lessons learned are recorded but not shared
- a team does not care if an audit is delayed or cancelled
- actions are only followed up and acted on for non-conformities
Developing the skills and capability within the wider organisation is about enhancing the ability to learn. When this becomes part of everyday activities, we cultivate a learning organisation.
Fiona Payne, Senior Quality Manager, CapGemini
These positive and negative indicators can help identify how the whole organisation views quality management and the quality function. By shaping beliefs and behaviours, we can influence an organisation's culture to ensure quality positively impacts project teams and business performance.

Download and explore ‘Bridging the gap: from compliance to performance in quality management’ to inspire actionable steps towards moving from compliance to performance through quality management practices.
How do we develop an organisation-wide quality capability?
Putting people and culture first helps achieve this positive impact and develop an organisation-wide quality capability. It is people who build systems and processes, deliver products and services, and engage with customers.
Start with identifying who your senior management sponsors and advocates are and get them on board with the importance of quality in your organisation. This level of buy-in and collaboration will help amplify your message and goals.
Establishing and building relationships with people in the organisation is crucial. Consider how to build in-person connections and the best way for you to be the visible presence for quality. This may be at meetings, site visits, sharing videos, attending roadshows.
Chris Achillea, HSEQ Director, Sodexo
Everyone has their own job to do and so delivering content and training about ISO 9001 may not always be relevant. Educating your colleagues on quality should take a simple and relevant approach, consider what your teams need to know, have and do to deliver quality capabilities. These are just some questions that prompt people to think about quality in their organisation:
- are our people engaged?
- what are their customer needs?
- do we know how effective our processes are?
- do our people know what to do, and how to do it?
- are relevant processes that add value established?
- is there an established framework and mechanism for effective customer engagement?
It is important to remember that colleagues have competing priorities, quality is everyone's business, but it is not their only priority. Make quality inclusive, be accessible, be approachable and encourage people to be part of the quality system.
Cultivating organisation-wide quality capability
Many factors can influence how quality capability is achieved, including industry, organisation size, governance structures and regulation. However, some key practices can be applied regardless of these.
We need to ensure that the governance around quality is transparent and proportionate. This needs to be reflected in practice and not just as a 'tick box' exercise that serves to satisfy external assessments. Quality must be integral in decision-making across the organisation. Ensuring quality is part of (or has sight of) the decision-making process mitigates against instances of decisions being made in silos which can negatively impact on the quality management systems.
Quality by consent is where we change the narrative. We don't just have quality systems because they look good or tick the box; we have them because they make us better at what we do.
We need to sell the benefit of continual improvement, feedback, complaints and non-conformances; these can all be leveraged to force positive change and improvement.
Lee Major, Deputy Director, Quality and Regulatory Assurance Division, UKHSA
This is the messaging we need to flow right through the organisation, from the school leaver who wants to develop their career through structured continuous professional development right up to the CEO looking to inform shareholders on the organisation's strategic direction. Language is critical; we know our audience, so we must adapt how and what we present.
Advocacy and the ability to build positive connections with people are the foundation for developing and embedding quality capability across the whole organisation.
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