NovaQTech Insights
Assessing Quality Culture with ISO 10010:2022 — From the Culture You Want to the Culture You Have
Most organizations that struggle with quality do not have a documentation problem. Their procedures are approved, their audits are scheduled, their certificates are on the wall — and yet the same problems return. We have written before about why quality culture matters more than quality systems (https://novaqtechgroup.com/2026/06/19/why-quality-culture-matters-more-than-quality-systems/). This article addresses the next, more practical question: once you accept that culture drives behaviour, how do you assess it and improve it systematically, rather than talking about it in general terms?
That is precisely the gap ISO 10010:2022 was published to fill.
What ISO 10010:2022 is — and what it is not
ISO 10010:2022, “Quality management — Guidance to understand, develop, assess and/or improve quality culture”, is a guidance standard. It contains no certifiable requirements and nobody will audit you against it. What it offers instead is a structured sequence for working on quality culture deliberately: understand your context, determine the quality culture you want, determine the one you actually have, act on the difference, embed the desired culture into how the organization runs, and sustain it over time. Its main clauses (4 to 9) follow exactly that logic, which makes the standard unusually practical for a guidance document.
Step 1: Start from context, not from values posters
Clause 4 grounds the work in the organization’s context: its strategy, its interested parties, and the external and internal issues that shape behaviour. This matters because there is no universal “good culture” to copy. The behaviours a high-reliability operation needs — stop-the-line authority, conservative escalation, zero tolerance for undocumented workarounds — differ from what a fast-moving product team needs. The desired culture has to serve your strategy and your risks, not a generic template.
Step 2: Determine the desired quality culture
Clause 5 asks top management to define, explicitly, the quality culture the organization intends to have: the values, beliefs and behaviours that people are expected to demonstrate, and the leadership behaviours that will model them. Two points deserve emphasis. First, the definition must be observable — “we value quality” is not a behaviour; “we stop the process and report it when something looks wrong, and no one is punished for doing so” is. Second, leadership behaviour is part of the definition, because employees read the real culture from what leaders reward, ignore and do under pressure — not from statements.
Step 3: Determine the current quality culture — honestly
Clause 6 is the assessment step, and it is where most culture initiatives quietly fail, because organizations assess the culture they wish they had. The standard points to multiple evidence sources — surveys, interviews, focus groups, observation of work as actually done, and the organization’s own records (nonconformities, complaints, audit findings, near-miss reporting rates). Used together, these reveal the gap between documented intent and lived behaviour. A rising number of reported problems, for example, often signals a strengthening culture, not a weakening one: people report more when they trust that reporting is safe and useful.
Our own assessment practice adds one discipline to this step: assess culture as a profile across its aspects, never as a single composite score. A single number — “our culture scores 68” — hides exactly what management needs to see. An organization can score well on customer focus and process discipline while scoring poorly on speaking up and learning from failure; the average looks acceptable, but the weakest aspect will govern behaviour under pressure. Report each aspect separately, state how confident you are in the evidence behind each judgement, and let the weakest aspect set the improvement agenda.
Step 4: Act on the gap — starting with leadership
Clause 7 covers determining and implementing actions to move from the current culture to the desired one. In practice, the effective actions are rarely campaigns or training alone. They are changes to the conditions that produce behaviour: what gets measured, what gets recognised, how leaders respond when bad news arrives, whether corrective action addresses causes or closes paperwork. If the first visible action is not a change in leadership behaviour, the workforce will correctly conclude that the initiative is cosmetic.
Steps 5 and 6: Embed it, then sustain it
Clause 8 is about embedding the desired culture into the organization’s processes — recruitment and onboarding, competence development, process design, supplier management, recognition systems — so that the culture does not depend on a few committed individuals. Clause 9 addresses sustaining it: monitoring whether behaviours hold over time, re-assessing periodically, and protecting the culture through leadership changes and growth. Culture work fails most often at these two stages, not at the launch.
Where to start
If your management system is technically sound but the same issues keep returning, a structured quality-culture assessment is usually more valuable than another procedure. Begin with the honest step: determine the culture you actually have, aspect by aspect, from evidence — then decide what to change.
NovaQTech’s ISO 10010:2022 Quality Culture — Guidance and Assessment Toolkit (https://novaqtechgroup.com/product/iso-100102022-quality-culture-guidance-and-assessment-toolkit/) turns the ISO 10010 sequence into a working set: a main guide following the standard’s structure, supporting procedures, survey and assessment workbooks that produce a per-aspect profile with a weakest-link quality culture index, an improvement action register, workshop slides and a fully worked example. A free sample is available on the product page. Quality culture is also treated in depth in Beyond ISO 9001: Next-Generation Quality Management (https://novaqtechgroup.com/2026/10/04/upcoming-book-beyond-iso-9001-next-generation-quality-management/), where it forms one dimension of the four-dimension framework.