Culture is a slippery concept. It matters, but that’s where agreement on the matter ends. Culture is an informal institution within an organisation: it’s the values and norms that guide behaviour outside of what is covered by explicit rules or policies. It provides intrinsic motivation for actions beyond the prospects for reward or punishment. It’s the spirit rather than the letter of the law. A business’s culture influences its ability to innovate and adapt in response to unforeseen problems and challenges. It determines openness to dissent and debate which can reduce the risk of fraud and “cover-ups”.
A company’s articulation of its culture should be read more as goals—or as advertising—than indicative of reality. An MIT study finds that 80% of large companies publish their corporate values on their website, but there is a negligible or even negative correlation between official statements and employee views. So how do you track the reality of it?
Job review websites are one of many “go-to” sources when analysing company culture and we have undertaken numerous engagements based on employee comments we have found on Glassdoor. When it comes to employee reviews, review website Glassdoor is the most popular source of data. Glassdoor has its shortcomings, but it does benefit from policies and standards that have been shown to reduce the polarisation of results and try to prevent companies from cheating.
Academic research—the Culture500 is a tool developed by MIT that uses Glassdoor to profile US companies. It covers companies that collectively employ over 30 million people, over one-quarter of private-sector employees in the US. For each company, it scrapes reviews for the nine most frequently cited values and ranks these by frequency (the percentage of reviews that mention the value) and sentiment (whether it is discussed in positive or negative terms). We can compare this with official corporate statements to get a high-level idea of the internal culture of a company.
Employee turnover—An alternative approach is to try and deduce something about the corporate culture from more measurable outcomes, for example, employee turnover. If staff are loyal to an institution and stay for a long time, it suggests they’re doing something right. Diversity (of all sorts) throughout an organisation can also be a reasonable indicator that a company has a culture of respect and collaboration.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
