Establishing a company's support for internal sustainability efforts (ISEs) such as gender equality, diversity, and staff welfare can be challenging due to the lack of operational methodologies and honest data documenting such efforts. To partly fix that, we developed (1) computational methods to extract sustainability mentions from employee reviews and (2) a personalised card game that matches people with a company that fits their values.

From a practical perspective, our two-element system could benefit both companies and employees. Companies could use tools similar to ours to track their workforce's sentiment, and re-evaluate their own internal sustainability efforts. Prospective employees, on the other hand, could use it to make well-informed decisions on which companies they would love to work for.

Methods

We theorized a six-dimension framework reflecting internal sustainability efforts (ISEs) and collected more than 350K employee reviews of 104 major companies across the whole US between 2008-2020. Our deep-learning Natural Language Processing framework scored each of these reviews and companies in terms of the six ISEs - infrastructure, diversity, education, atmosphere, health and monetary. Our findings revealed that companies that scored high in ISEs also enjoyed high stock growth, indicating a strong commitment to ISEs at the micro-level.

Card game

Using the calculated scores, we designed and developed “Companies that care” - a personalized card game that raises sustainability awareness. The game starts with a short questionnaire on personal values, employer’s values and professional interests. Afterwards, it presents users with three cards: one visualizing the user's values and the other two visualizing the values of two companies: company of user’s interest and company with the highest personal value alignment.

Companies that care: Launch demo

Publications

• Insider stories: Analyzing Internal Sustainability Efforts of major US companies from online reviews. Nature, Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, 2023. PDF
• Visualizing Internal Sustainability Efforts in Big Companies. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 2022. PDF