Things Employees Like and Dislike About Their Companies
I work in people analytics and have been wondering all the time what make employees feel great or bad about their companies. Is it money? Workload? Opportunities to grow? Or team around them? I know the answer depends on the company, but is there anything in common for companies that employees like or dislike the most?
I went to Glassdoor for help. Glassdoor is one of the world’s largest growing job sites where employees anonymously review current or former employers. I did my studies based on the 6,000 companies that have an office in Vancouver, BC.
Out of the 6,000 companies, the ones with less than 100 reviews are removed. I sort by overall company rating (from 0 to 5) and select the top and bottom 10.
Then, I scrape all employee reviews for each of the 20 companies. These are the text pre-processing and cleansing steps:
- Convert all words to lowercase
- Remove non-alphabet characters
- Tokenization: breaking sentences into words
- Remove short word (length less than 3)
- Lemmatization: converting a word to its base form e.g. says, said and saying to say
- Remove common English words e.g. a, the, of, etc., and remove common words that add very little value to our analysis, e.g. good, bad, great, etc.
Now, all review texts are converted to well-formatted arrays of words with identical morphological roots. Let’s do some analysis.
On Glassdoor, employees leave their reviews about a company in two fields: Pros (things they like) and Cons (things they dislike). I use reviews from Pros for analysis of top 10 companies, and reviews from Cons for bottom 10 companies. In total, there are 3633 positive reviews and 1630 negative reviews.
Here are top 20 common words about employee likes and dislikes:
What employees like?
- Culture, team
- Product
- Management, leadership
- Work life balance, benefits, care
- Opportunity, growth, learn
It makes GREAT sense. Surprisingly, pay is not even in this list!!
What employees dislike?
- (Poor) Manager, upper management, leadership
- (Poor) pay, wage, raise, salary, benefits
- (Poor) Culture, team, environment
- Long (hours), (poor) schedule
- (Lack of) training, (too much) change
When things go wrong, you can see management team gets a lot of blames. Poor pay is mentioned many times. Unreasonable amount of work is also a source of unhappiness. So, if an employee is happy about his/her work environment in general, there is not much focus on pay. Money becomes a big concern when work hours are long and people do not feel the love.
Here are word clouds for top 5 companies:
Here are word clouds for bottom 5 companies:
Originally published at https://ai-journey.com on September 4, 2019.
