The importance of workplace cultures

Methodology

This research was split into two parts. The first looked at workplace culture within the ad industry compared to the UK more generally, and the second was focused on talent retention – what employees are looking for and how companies can improve.

This survey was nationally representative and included all industries. We also boosted the sample of workers from ethnic communities that took part in this survey.

This survey was then compared to the results from the All In Survey, created by the Advertising Association, IPA, ISBA and Kantar, which had more than 9,000 responses. The All In survey was more reflective of the advertising industry’s demographics and was self-selecting so not necessarily fully representative.

Industry overview: How do we stack up?

We asked whether people thought their current employer treated everyone equally regardless of different demographics, such as age, gender, and so on. What we saw when comparing the results is that those in the advertising industry thought their employers were less likely to treat people equally than in our national survey.

The advertising industry performed particularly badly on the perception of treating people with a disability equally. However, they were seen to be better when it came to sexual orientation.

When you look at this data compared to data from similar industries, the gap in terms of the treatment of employees remains.

Our results did find that workplace culture is stronger in the advertising industry than average.

Advertising employees were less likely to agree with the negative statements and were more likely to agree with the positive statements. Furthermore, when you look closer at topics of inclusivity, the ad industry does better than average.  

However, despite high awareness of inclusion and initiatives, we did see a repeating theme of inequality, despite inclusion. This is because the advertising industry performs much worse on two statements:

• Providing equal pay for equal work
• Unfairly using who you know, rather than what you know to get into the industry

So the main message from this section – the advertising industry is doing well on inclusivity, but isn’t seen to be treating people equally.

Retaining talent: The need for recognition

This section is based around what employers can do to retain talent and how recognition plays an important role in this. The chart below looks at what experiences employees have had, as well as to what extent it may have caused them to consider leaving, or actually left as a result.

The dark blue dots represent those who have said they’ve experienced each. The top experience is a simple lack of being paid properly for the work people do – which is a lot easier to fix than some of the other, thornier issues, such as feelings of being undervalued, uncomfortable or facing patronising behaviour.

There is also obviously a darker side to these results, where high numbers of employees have suffered from harassment and bullying. Unsurprisingly, experiencing these behaviours is more likely to cause people to leave. The conversion percentage along the bottom represents the amount of people who have suffered from one of these aspects and considered leaving their job as a result.

All of these require deep cultural change. timeTo is doing some fantastic work in this area, providing training and resources to achieve their aim putting an end to sexual harassment. Learn more about them and the work they do here: https://timeto.org.uk/  

So what is important to employees? And what are they looking for in a job?

We found that positive recognition of their work surpasses the more functional benefits of working, such as being able to work flexibly or providing IT equipment. Essentially, telling your employees that you appreciate the work they’re doing far outweighs having a nice laptop stand or comfy chair.

The aspect that came out as least important is having the opportunity to pursue work-related interests outside of your regular responsibilities. It is interesting to see that not everyone wants to have a side hustle or extras on top, rather employees want to see you get the basics right instead.

Being in touch with the emotional side and feeding that into your communications strategies is also important. The research found that reaching out and supporting employees through hard times proved beneficial – asking employees how they’re doing outside of work can go a long way.

This is a quote from a worker which summarises all of this:

Watch the presentation

The Importance of Workplace Cultures: IPA Talent & Diversity Conference 2022 from The IPA on Vimeo.