I work in people analytics and have been wondering all the time what make employees feel great or bad about their companies. Is it money? Workload? Opportunities to grow? Or team around them? I know the answer depends on the company, but is there anything in common for companies that employees like or dislike the most?

I went to Glassdoor for help. Glassdoor is one of the world’s largest growing job sites where employees anonymously review current or former employers. I did my studies based on the 6,000 companies that have an office in Vancouver, BC.

Collecting Employee Reviews

Out of the 6,000 companies, the ones with less than 100 reviews are removed. I sort by overall company rating (from 0 to 5) and select the top and bottom 10.

Then, I scrape all employee reviews for each of the 20 companies. These are the text pre-processing and cleansing steps:

Convert all words to lowercase
Remove non-alphabet characters
Tokenization: breaking sentences into words
Remove short word (length less than 3)
Lemmatization: converting a word to its base form e.g. says, said and saying to say
Remove common English words e.g. a, the, of, etc., and remove common words that add very little value to our analysis, e.g. good, bad, great, etc.

Now, all review texts are converted to well-formatted arrays of words with identical morphological roots. Let’s do some analysis.

Employee Most Likes and Dislikes

On Glassdoor, employees leave their reviews about a company in two fields: Pros (things they like) and Cons (things they dislike). I use reviews from Pros for analysis of top 10 companies, and reviews from Cons for bottom 10 companies. In total, there are 3633 positive reviews and 1630 negative reviews.

Here are top 20 common words about employee likes and dislikes:

Likes		Dislikes
common_word	frequency	common_word	frequency
culture	701	management	470
benefit	672	pay	245
team	443	manager	180
life	357	customer	135
environment	347	change	116
care	316	team	94
opportunity	309	upper	80
management	274	sale	80
product	269	wage	77
balance	263	environment	77
family	255	staff	76
learn	236	leadership	74
leadership	229	training	74
feel	223	care	68
ultimate	221	salary	67
love	213	long	65
customer	210	benefit	64
growth	207	schedule	63
technology	196	culture	62
help	193	raise	60

What employees like?

Culture, team
Product
Management, leadership
Work life balance, benefits, care
Opportunity, growth, learn

It makes GREAT sense. Surprisingly, pay is not even in this list!!

What employees dislike?

(Poor) Manager, upper management, leadership
(Poor) pay, wage, raise, salary, benefits
(Poor) Culture, team, environment
Long (hours), (poor) schedule
(Lack of) training, (too much) change

When things go wrong, you can see management team gets a lot of blames. Poor pay is mentioned many times. Unreasonable amount of work is also a source of unhappiness. So, if an employee is happy about his/her work environment in general, there is not much focus on pay. Money becomes a big concern when work hours are long and people do not feel the love.