While nearly every element of quality management can be shared and "imitation" very quickly, quality culture is "remaining separate" and cannot be "imitation". In today's business environment, this is the "identity", the sustainable competitive advantage (or sustainable competitive advantage, if the business does not form a positive quality culture) of the company. enterprise.

Corporate culture is often seen as a set of values and norms shared by people in an organization, which participate in regulating the way individuals in an organization interact with other individuals and with people outside the organization. Theoretically, corporate culture includes factors such as psychology, attitudes, experiences, beliefs and values of the enterprise. Simply put, this concept consists of two components: external manifestations and internal values/beliefs. In a narrow sense, quality culture also has two components, which are the external manifestations of quality management and the internal values/beliefs of quality.

The external manifestations of the quality culture we can see in an organization can be work processes, focus of production workers, cleanliness and tidiness in the factory, employee's attitude towards anomalies, how the organization responds to customer feedback... These external manifestations will directly contribute to improving the quality of operations and products/ service. However, the internal elements of the quality culture with its new perceptions, beliefs and values are at the core and ensure its ability to sustain the positive and expected external manifestations. We can only properly appreciate the quality culture of an enterprise when we consider both groups of factors.

When we go to a business and see that the factory is very neat, orderly and clean, everything is in its place, we may think that it is the quality culture characteristic of this business. However, when we ask a worker about their previous day's work, we are told that the whole day before they stopped production to clean up the factory for the next day's reception, when satisfaction Our belief about the newly formed “quality culture trait” will collapse. When we come to a business and see very detailed and complete customer feedback processing reports, we might think it's a manifestation of a customer-oriented quality culture. If you have the opportunity to work with the staff in charge and they show us the actions in the report that have been taken, and are passionate about talking about countermeasures and improvement or about the importance of getting back trust from customers, only then can we truly have a firm belief in the customer-oriented cultural characteristics of the business.

There is no business without a culture of quality. Even in any business, we can see behaviors, attitudes, methods, and assessments that are perceived, confirming the presence or absence of values or beliefs. The only thing is whether the cultural factors of each business are positive or not, contributing to the sustainable development of the business or not. We can see that there are businesses with a neat and clean culture, and there are businesses with a messy, sloppy culture; some enterprises have a culture of respecting customers, and there are enterprises with a culture of disrespecting or belittling customers; Some businesses have a culture of continuous improvement, and there are businesses with a culture of "fire fighting" in solving problems. This is a cognitive and practical challenge for leaders and managers. Many people think that quality culture means good, positive, and so if they have not had the opportunity to pay attention to quality culture, quality management will not improve, but at least it will not. deteriorate and harm production and business activities. In fact, quality culture is a factor that in itself can change on a wide range from very bad, very harmful for production and business, to very good and very beneficial for production and business. You have a good piece of land, if you do not intend to plant flowers, it will not forever be empty land, grass will quickly grow on this land.

What business leader and manager wants to establish and reinforce a bad and toxic quality culture in their business? The problem is that a culture of quality can be created intentionally or unintentionally. When there is an intention, no one has a bad intention, however, even in the case of business leaders with good intentions, the cultural factors of quality are not always good. On the contrary, if the business does not have a quality culture in mind, there is little chance that the elements of the quality culture will be good. This is why we don't see too many businesses today that have good, positive cultural characteristics and contribute to business development in a sustainable way – we see a lot of "grassland". wild" rather than "beautiful flower gardens". Here, the extremely important task of leaders and managers is how to identify the quality cultural characteristics that the business is aiming for, and then find ways to shape and strengthen them.

Author: Pham Minh Thang, Director of P&Q Solutions