Employee Values & Company Culture
- Bosses often tout their company's culture, but defining it can be challenging.
- CultureX gathers anonymous employee reviews from Glassdoor, a website where people review their workplaces.
- to analyze these reviews, CultureX uses a natural-language processing model to classify text into over 200 culture-related topics. these topics are then grouped into nine themes considered important...
Uncover the secrets of corporate culture with our deep dive into employee values.This study reveals how CultureX and The Economist analyzed employee reviews from Glassdoor across 900 companies, pinpointing key themes like leadership, work-life balance, and transparency.Discover how strong leadership frequently enough correlates with positive cultural traits and how platforms like Glassdoor ensure authentic insights. We explore the measures taken to filter biased reviews, offering readers a clearer understanding of company culture. News directory 3 could find this details valuable.Learn which attributes workers prioritize, and gain valuable insights for your job search. discover what’s next in the evolution of workplace culture.
Study measures corporate culture through employee reviews
Updated June 16, 2025
Bosses often tout their company’s culture, but defining it can be challenging. The Economist partnered with CultureX, an AI research firm, to assess corporate culture across 900 companies in 19 industries. The data reveals that a company can excel in some cultural aspects while struggling in others.
CultureX gathers anonymous employee reviews from Glassdoor, a website where people review their workplaces. The study analyzed reviews written between January 2023 and April 2025. While Glassdoor allows users to rate their employers on various metrics, CultureX focuses on the written reviews where employees describe the pros and cons of their workplace in their own words.
to analyze these reviews, CultureX uses a natural-language processing model to classify text into over 200 culture-related topics. these topics are then grouped into nine themes considered important to company culture: leadership, support, toxicity, work-life balance, agility, candor, innovation, strategy and transparency.
some themes are straightforward, while others are more nuanced. “Support” reflects whether employees feel cared for by their bosses. “Toxicity” measures the tolerance of disrespectful behavior. “Agility” gauges a company’s ability to adapt to market changes. “Candor” quantifies how agreeable employees are expressing their opinions, and “transparency” assesses how well data is shared.
CultureX calculates how frequently and positively employees speak about these themes, benchmarking companies against their industry peers. The resulting scores indicate how many standard deviations a firm scores above or below its industry average on a specific cultural theme. The study indicates that companies with strong leadership scores often excel in other cultural areas as well.
Glassdoor implements several measures to ensure review authenticity. Users must provide information about their own employers before accessing reviews, and they can only post about their employers once a year. These rules help prevent skewed or biased reviews.
Glassdoor also uses machine-learning algorithms to detect suspicious activity, such as multiple submissions from the same IP address or repetitive language. Reviews suspected of being coerced or incentivized are removed.CultureX then conducts its own checks to identify companies that may be inflating their ratings. Approximately 5% of companies were excluded from the analysis due to these concerns.
Don sull, a co-founder of CultureX and professor at MIT, said the goal of the analysis is not to force companies into a single culture, but to understand the cultural attributes that workers and managers value. This helps workers find companies that align with their preferences, whether they prioritize innovation, work-life balance, or other factors.
What’s next
Future research could explore how these cultural attributes impact company performance and employee satisfaction over time.