In the MIT SMR/Glassdoor Culture 500 analysis, 93% of employees discuss some element of culture in their reviews, and 41% discuss one or more of the Big Nine values.

Prevalence of Culture Discussion in Glassdoor Reviews

A single Glassdoor review could reflect one employee's idiosyncratic view, but aggregating hundreds or thousands of reviews paints an accurate picture of a company's culture.

Aggregating Glassdoor Reviews for Accurate Culture Assessment

A common concern with online reviews is that they can skew toward a polarized distribution, with many glowing reviews, a disproportionate number of extremely negative reviews, and relatively few moderate opinions. This pattern is documented across settings such as Amazon products and Yelp restaurants, and it occurs when users with extremely positive or extremely negative views are especially motivated to write reviews.

Polarization Risk in Online Reviews

Reviews might not present an accurate picture of organizational culture if companies incentivize or pressure employees to write glowing evaluations.

Employer Pressure as a Threat to Glassdoor Review Accuracy

When describing culture, Glassdoor reviewers use rich and varied language, including slang, idioms, acronyms, buzzwords, and colorful phrases. For a topic such as integrity, employees used many synonyms, antonyms, idioms, and slang terms.

Linguistic Variety in Glassdoor Culture Reviews

Glassdoor reviewers use rich and varied language when describing culture. That language paints a nuanced picture of corporate culture, but it also defies simplistic approaches to textual analysis.

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To accurately classify text into topics that matter to managers and researchers, the Culture 500 researchers built a custom dictionary using machine learning tools and human expertise. After a three-year process, the dictionary contained over 20,000 highly accurate terms mapped to more than 90 topics.

MIT SMR/Glassdoor Culture 500

MIT Sloan Management Review project page on measuring culture in leading companies, including the Culture 500 dataset. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/projects/measuring-culture-in-leading-companies/

MIT Sloan Management Review

The MIT Sloan Culture 500 ranks major companies across nine dimensions of corporate culture using Glassdoor reviews. It also celebrates cultural excellence through public recognition and identifies areas where influential companies can improve their culture.

MIT Sloan Culture 500 Rankings of Corporate Culture

The Culture 500 interactive tool provides a snapshot of how frequently and positively employees within a company talk about the Big Nine values.

Culture 500 Snapshot of a Single Company's Cultural Profile

The Culture 500 allows users to benchmark companies against their competitors on each of the Big Nine values.

Competitor Benchmarking View in Culture 500

Glassdoor Open-Text Reviews for Culture Insight

To detect potentially problematic reviews, the Culture 500 researchers identified positive spikes: company-months in which both the number of reviews and the overall company rating were two or more standard deviations above the monthly mean.

Positive Review Spike Detection in Culture 500

To classify reviews into topics that matter to managers and researchers, the Culture 500 team built a custom dictionary from the ground up by combining machine learning tools with human expertise. This approach dramatically improved the accuracy of their models.

Custom Culture 500 Dictionary Combining Machine Learning and Human Expertise

Nearly all organizations in the Culture 500 are for-profit companies and most are headquartered in the United States. Some international companies with large U.S.-based workforces are also included, but regardless of headquarters location, only reviews from employees based in the U.S. are used in the analysis.

For-Profit US-Based Composition of the Culture 500 Sample

The Culture 500 organizes its companies into 33 clearly defined industries, with an average of 18 companies per industry. In the tool's industry bar graphs, the number to the right of each bar denotes the count of companies included in that industry.

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