“The Growing Significance of Company Culture: Insights from Content Marketing Institute’s Experts.”

Creating a High-Performance Culture: The Role of Company Culture in Driving Success

Research shows that every company has a culture, but only the successful ones have the ability to change theirs. A new study conducted by B2B marketing research firm Ascend2 with the Arbinger Institute reveals that many companies are aware of the need to improve their culture, but they fail to address the key components that make those changes happen. Chief strategy advisor of CMI, Robert Rose, shares some insightful tips in this week’s CMI News video on how to improve the culture of a business.

Increasing Importance of Company Culture

The workforce no longer tolerates unsatisfactory company cultures, and 88% of the leaders surveyed expect the importance of culture to increase significantly this year. This view is reinforced by the fact that 46% of leaders say improving the business’ culture increases productivity, while 40% indicated that it improves retention. Surprisingly, only 26% think that it increases revenue while the same number believes that it enhances communication and collaboration.

Challenges to Improving Culture

According to Robert Rose, the primary challenges for improving a company’s culture involve changing the habits of how people work together. This includes evolving the strategy, staying consistent, having the resources to implement changes, achieving employee adoption, and creating a strategy to track performance. The most significant hurdle, however, is getting buy-in from leadership. While 90% of executives believe that company culture is increasing in importance, 25% of decision-makers struggle to get buy-in from the rest of the leadership team.

Reflecting on Culture’s Meaning

It’s important to reflect on what company culture means. Many companies tend to reduce it to something like shared values or balancing work tasks and employee engagement. However, culture encompasses diversity, equity, inclusion programs, leadership training, and performance tracking. According to Edgar Shein, a leading researcher in this field, 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. Therefore, 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 Habits

Changing company culture means breaking habits and developing new ones. This requires creating new, good habits to break the old, bad ones. When organizations deploy new marketing operations, content strategies, storytelling capabilities, or content marketing initiatives, they are changing the culture of the business. Robert Rose reminds us that creating a new culture takes time, and in the short term, the primary focus should be investing in a new culture – new habits – to evolve the business, rather than just striving for efficiency.

Creating New Cultures

To create a new culture, consider every aspect of the company – from workflow to introducing new content operational processes, brand strategies, internal performance measurement programs, DEI programs, and leadership training initiatives. Let us know in the comments how your team creates new cultures.

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