Quality culture: take the pulse with the AFNOR barometer

Quality is no longer the preserve of quality control specialists! Gone are the days when the subject was only addressed in terms of product non-compliance and customer satisfaction, with management devolved to a single person. In the company of 2025, quality is closer to the concept of performance in the broad sense, including non-financial performance, than to the strictly technical concept of compliance. And because of this, it concerns everyone in the organization chart. A bit like culture of food safety With regard to food safety, quality culture is the intellectual extension of quality as defined by ISO 9001. To the extent that the next version of this voluntary standard , announced for 2026, will devote a large part of it to this topic. Specialists needed it: offering quality professionals a new approach to quality by taking it out of their reserved domain was an expectation that was clearly reflected in a study conducted by the AFNOR group in 2023 with the BVA institute, entitled Quality around the world, trends and paradoxes .

In 2025, the group devoted an entire white paper to quality culture, entitled "How to measure quality culture?", and free download .

" Quality culture is a unifying foundation of values, behaviors, and skills shared by every member of the organization," explains Vincent Blache, a specialist in this field at the AFNOR group. Integrating it into all levels of an organization, whether small or large, public or private, is essential for optimizing day-to-day performance in the service of customers and stakeholders, and ultimately ensuring the organization's long-term viability. Quality culture therefore goes far beyond the scope of formalized quality systems, becoming embedded in the very DNA of the company. This is an interesting consideration at a time when France is seeking to move up a gear in terms of reindustrialization, with AFNOR arguing that a sound reindustrialization policy requires, among other things, a good quality policy! "Many manufacturers have long since chosen to commit to this approach, and they are seeing the benefits," says Franck Lebeugle, Director of Standardization Activities at AFNOR. in an opinion piece published in Les Echos on March 18, 2025 .

Quality culture barometer: six beta tester manufacturers

In 2022, a voluntary standard set out a series of recommendations for understanding, assessing, and improving organizational quality culture: ISO 10010 . But we needed to go further, in particular by offering a tool to assess the degree of ownership and belonging to a culture of quality within the company, without leaving anyone out of the structure and without the ephemeral, predictable, selective, and non-anonymized aspect of an audit. That is what we intend to do. the quality culture barometer AFNOR is launching in 2025, based on a full-scale test deployed in 2024 with several manufacturers keen to involve their teams, across all departments, in the assessment and dissemination of an in-house quality culture: Française des Jeux, Laboratoires Pierre Fabre, Michelin, Naval Group, Nigay, and Soitec. "For those of us who build military ships that will last at least 40 years, the issue of knowledge transfer between generations is clearly part of the quality culture: we must be able to continue to respond to our customers even after the retirement of the employees who were involved in the design of the product," explains Christophe Perrin, Quality Director at Naval Group in Lorient. It is therefore a question of practices, behaviors, and skills. The AFNOR barometer was presented at the EOQ 2024 European Quality Congress in Reims in mid-November 2024, and the tool is now available in freemium mode for testing a single-site assessment with fewer than 80 employees, and in premium mode for more in-depth analysis.

The barometer is based on online questionnaires but can also be supplemented by individual interviews with influential leaders and collective intelligence workshops. "There are many different perspectives, and cross-referencing questions reveals information that traditional quality assurance tools cannot bring to light," explains Vincent Blache. The results make it possible to identify strengths and areas for improvement, compare different sites or entities, and benchmark against other companies in the sector. All of this is visualized in the form of diagrams and compass roses, with the added bonus of an NPQS (Net Promoter Quality Score) calculation, an indicator that measures employees' propensity to consider themselves ambassadors of quality and to declare themselves ready to improve it. All that remains is to turn this propensity into action: this is where the AFNOR group's coaching and support services come in, backed by its portfolio of quality experts. A special e-learning course on quality culture will also soon be available at AFNOR Competencies .