Organizational Culture
Project 1: Organizational Pride and Psychological Safety in the Workplace
Description
What makes employees proud of their workplace, and what makes them feel safe to speak up? These questions get at the heart of a thriving organizational culture—yet are notoriously difficult to measure at scale. In this project, we developed a deep-learning framework to automatically detect two crucial aspects of company culture—organizational pride and psychological safety—by analyzing over 430,000 Glassdoor reviews from 318 major U.S. companies, spanning 12 years.
Our findings reveal a nuanced landscape: Pride in one’s company is highest in the energy and utility sectors, while psychological safety—feeling safe to take risks and share ideas—is strongest in IT, but notably lacking in communications and healthcare. Importantly, these two traits matter: both independently predict how satisfied employees feel at work, with organizational pride emerging as an especially powerful driver of overall satisfaction. Our approach, validated against both manual and AI benchmarks, paves the way for low-cost, automated monitoring of company culture—empowering organizations to foster happier, more productive workplaces.
Publications
- Uncovering Organisational Pride and 1 Psychological Safety from Glassdoor Reviews. EPJ Data Science 2025. PDF
Project 2: Internal Sustainability Efforts (ISE)
Description
What really goes on inside companies when it comes to sustainability—and how can we tell, beyond glossy reports? In this project, we set out to reveal the true state of internal sustainability efforts (ISEs) in major US companies, from the perspective of those who know best: their employees. Using more than 350,000 online reviews spanning 104 leading companies over twelve years, we developed a deep-learning framework to identify six key dimensions of internal sustainability, from health and education to diversity, workplace atmosphere, infrastructure, and fair pay.
Our analysis uncovered that companies with stronger commitments to staff welfare—things like supportive environments and equal opportunities—don’t just win higher praise from employees: they also tend to enjoy better stock growth. These positive effects hold across industries, with IT and industrials leading the way, while consumer goods lag behind. By translating the broad United Nations Sustainable Development Goals into concrete, employee-centered metrics, our work offers companies, policymakers, and researchers a robust new way to monitor and advance the “insider” side of sustainability—where it matters most.
Publications
- Insider stories: analyzing internal sustainability efforts of major US companies from online reviews. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 2023. PDF
Demo and Interactive Tools
Explore our interactive sustainability culture analysis tool: ISE Demo
Project 3: Quantifying the impact of positive stress on companies from online employee reviews
Description
We often think of stress only negatively. Forty per cent of workers consider their jobs stressful; a number that has significantly increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Workplace stress is often linked to lower motivation, absenteeism, poor performance, decline in well-being, and higher employee turnover. It is also estimated to amount to 190 billions in healthcare costs in the U.S. alone.
But could there be a positive type of stress? Can we recall situations with an important but challenging task in front of us for which we put a lot of effort to, in the end, complete it successfully and be rewarded and enriched by the experience? Such workplace experience can motivate employees to push their limits and progress. And it can feel stressful at the time—this is what researchers termed positive stress or eustress.
In this work, we demonstrated uncovering such positive stress (and distinguishing it from negative) in online employee reviews of S&P500 companies. We found that for companies whose employees exhibited positive stress (as opposed to those with negative/low stress or passivity) their stocks were significantly more likely to grow, and the language in their reviews reflected collaborative and inspiring work environments. Moreover, the overall amount of negative stress in S&P500 companies closely followed the unemployment rate in the U.S. during the Great Recession.
Publications
- Quantifying the impact of positive stress on companies from online employee reviews. Nature Scientific Reports 2022 PDF
Code and data
N.B.: If you do not receive the instruction message within a few hours, please check your junk/spam e-mail folder just in case the email was moved there.