About
We score corporate culture along the following five values
Click on a value to discover more
innovation
integrity
respect
teamwork
quality
Why
We believe culture scores are useful for two things; recruitment and security analysis. Historically there has been much focus on the skills side of recruitment and relatively little on the “soft” side of personality and culture. We have seen how popular Glassdoor has become over the past few years, as people search beyond what the company website says. Ensuring that employees work in a culture that is right for them is crucial for employee satisfaction and productivity. High employee turnover is not good for anyone; it wastes the time and effort of employees and results in a big hit to the firm in terms of training, lost knowledge and productivity as new recruits take time to become productive. This applies to both management and “rank and file”.
Academic research has shown how employee satisfaction is not only a leading indicator of firms’ productivity but also of equity performance. Other research has also found that companies which score highly on “good” values (such as innovation or integrity) also outperform the average company, both operationally and (in the case of listed companies) in terms of equity performance.
How we do it
We analyse speech and text from mutliple sources to build up a cultural profile of a firm. These sources include:
- earnings calls
- conference talks
- news interviews
- filings; Management Discussion & Analysis
Research has identified the following five values as the most mentioned by firms when talking about their culture:
- Innovation
- Integrity
- Teamwork
- Respect
- Quality
Across thousands of firms over more than ten years, we apply modern machine learning techniques to the many millions of phrases which come from the above sources to create dictionaries of phrases that are most relevant to these five cultural values. By counting how frequently these phrases occur and how relevant they are to an underlying cultural value, we can compute scores for each value for any given firm. Scores range from 1 to 100 and represent percentile rankings across all firms. Not only do we provide these scores, we also provide tools to dig deeper and see which phrases are driving the score.
What we provide
We analyse thousands of companies and for each one compute five cultural value scores. We provide tools to compare scores across companies which can be filtered by many criteria. Importantly, users can specify a preference weighting across the cultural values, enabling users to give more (less) weight to their more (less) favoured values.
A word on bias
Give the sources above, it is obvious that our scores are reflective of that the C-suite say to the outside world. Therefore there is a potential bias for our scores to be too optimistic, confident or bullish. We counter this in two ways. First, we seperate out speech which is scripted (eg a prepared talk or intro to a quarterly earnings call) and unscripted (mainly Q&A sessions, such as the second half of an earnings call). Unscripted is given a bigger weight in the calculation of scores as this helps mitigate against the CEO always presenting the best-light. Secondly, we are conscious that job-hunters and security analysts will already be using GlassDoor et al. GlassDoor is more reflective of the levels below the C-suite and so we believe our scores are a nice compliment to that. Company culture is an ephermal thing and so they are many ways one can analyse it. Although many people disagree on definitions and calculations, all agree that company culture is important. Culture Scores is our attempt at measuring it.