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Company Culture Importance Rises – Content Marketing Institute

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Company Culture Importance Rises - Content Marketing Institute

Every company has a culture, but only the successful have the ability to change theirs.

New research points to a lot of companies knowing they need to get better but failing to address the one key component.

This week, B2B marketing research firm Ascend2 released new research with the Arbinger Institute – Creating a High-Performance Culture: The Role of Company Culture in Driving Success (registration required).

CMI’s chief strategy advisor Robert Rose shares his thoughts in this week’s CMI News video. Watch it below, or keep reading for the highlights:

The study finds the workforce no longer tolerates (or has greatly reduced tolerance) unsatisfactory company cultures. Eighty-eight percent of the leaders surveyed expect the importance of culture to increase significantly this year.
88% of leaders in @Arbinger @Ascend2research survey say the importance of company culture will increase significantly this year, says @Robert_Rose via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet
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Improving the business’ culture brings more than worker satisfaction. Almost half (46%) of the leaders say it leads to increased productivity, and 40% indicate it improves retention. Interestingly, only 26% say it increases revenue; the same number think it improves communication and collaboration.

Robert says these findings suggest a culture’s benefit centers on efficiency – more employees stay longer and do more stuff – rather than growth opportunities for the business.

Hurdles to better culture

More interesting, Robert says, the top challenges for improving company culture relate to changing habits of how people work together – evolving the strategy, staying consistent, having the resources to implement changes, employee adoption, and creating a strategy to track performance. And his favorite hurdle? Buy-in from leadership.

The report reveals the ironic conclusion: 90% of executives say the importance of company culture is increasing, yet 25% of decision-makers struggle to get buy-in from the rest of the leadership team.

“Businesses want to change the culture as long as they don’t have to change anything,” Robert says.

Businesses want to change the culture as long as they don’t have to change anything, says @Robert_Rose via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

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Reflect on culture’s meaning

Robert advises you to take a step back and ask, “What the heck is culture anyways?”

Too often, companies reduce culture to something like shared values or balancing work tasks and employee engagement. Over the last 15 years, this thinking translated into casual work attire and flexible work environments. As this research highlights, culture encompasses diversity, equity, inclusion programs, leadership training, and performance tracking.

While those ideas aren’t wrong, Robert says they complicate a simple idea. “Company culture is the institutional habits of how you work together,” he says.

Think habits

Edgar Shein, a leading researcher in the field, says culture is a “pattern of basic assumptions” group members acquire over time as they learn to cope successfully with internal and external organizationally relevant problems. In other words, when you answer the question of how to do something and include “that’s the way it’s always been done,” that’s culture.

“Changing culture isn’t just changing the way the business works. It requires changing how the business has ‘always worked,’” Robert says. “It requires breaking habits, which sometimes can be hard.”

Changing culture isn’t just changing the way business works. It requires breaking habits, says @Robert_Rose via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

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As marketing and content practitioners, you see this every day. You are changing the organization’s culture when you deploy new marketing operations, content strategies, storytelling capabilities, and content marketing initiatives. It’s not easy.

The Ascend2 research concludes a “shift in mindset” enables better outcomes for improving culture. Robert doesn’t disagree, but he suggests breaking that down to view them as habit changes.

He subscribes to the teaching that developing better habits doesn’t require the bad habits you have. It should involve creating new, good habits to break those bad habits.

Whether changing workflow, introducing a new content operational process, a new brand strategy, an internal performance measurement program, a DEI program, or a leadership training initiative, you create a new culture, not change the existing one.

“It takes time. In the short term, the main goal shouldn’t be efficiency. It should be investing in a new culture – new habits – to evolve the business,” Robert says.

How is your team creating new cultures? Let us know in the comments.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute



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MARKETING

Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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More promotions and more layoffs

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More promotions and more layoffs

For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.

The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.

Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes

Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643. 

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Here are the median salaries by role:

  • Senior management $199,653
  • Director $157,776
  • Manager $99,510
  • Staff $89,126

Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.

One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%). 

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Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.

Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams

Employee turnover 

In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”

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Men and Women

Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540

This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.

In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.

Methodology

The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents. 

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Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.

Get MarTech! Daily. Free. In your inbox.

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