What employees think of their companies’ values

Bosses love to talk about company culture. Yet the concept is fuzzy. The Economist has partnered with CultureX, a research and AI firm, to measure corporate culture across 900 firms in 19 industries. CultureX’s data show that, while companies are often described as having a “good” or a “bad” culture, the concept has many dimensions. This means that firms can succeed at cultivating some aspects of their culture, while failing at others.

To measure corporate culture, CultureX starts by compiling anonymous reviews submitted by employees to Glassdoor, a workplace-review website. For this project we focused on those written between January 2023 and April 2025. Although Glassdoor allows users to rate their employers on several measures, including “culture & values”, CultureX analyses the free-form responses that employees submit with their reviews, in which they describe in their own words the pros and cons of working for a company.

To organise the information in these reviews, CultureX uses a custom-built natural-language processing model to classify text into more than 200 culture-related topics. These topics are then categorised into themes deemed by the academic literature to be important to company culture. In this project, we focused on nine: leadership, support, toxicity, work-life balance, agility, candour, innovation, strategy and transparency.

Although themes such as “leadership”, “innovation”, “strategy” and “work-life balance” are relatively straightforward, others are more nuanced. “Support” measures whether employees feel that their bosses care about them; “toxicity” measures the extent to which disrespectful behaviour is tolerated; “agility” gauges a company’s ability to respond to changes in the marketplace; “candour” quantifies how comfortable employees are expressing their opinions and concerns; and “transparency” assesses how well information is shared among employees.

For each theme, CultureX calculates how frequently and positively employees from different companies speak about these topics, and benchmarks different companies against peers in their industry to derive the scores used in this interactive. Each reported value represents how many standard deviations a given firm scores above or below its industry average on a specific cultural theme. Our first interactive chart shows how firms’ ratings compare with those of others in their industry on agility, leadership, toxicity and work-life balance. The second chart shows that firms with high leadership scores also tend to do well on other measures.

There are risks to conducting research using user-generated content. To ensure that reviews are not written entirely by users with extremely positive or extremely negative views, Glassdoor requires users to submit information about their own employers before gaining access to any reviews on its site. Those who choose to post about their employers are only allowed to do so once a year, which mitigates against ballot-stuffing. These rules help to ensure that reviews are less polarised and more representative.

To combat fraud, Glassdoor uses machine-learning algorithms to identify suspicious activity such as multiple submissions from the same IP address or generic, repetitive language. Reviews believed to be the product of compensation or coercion are removed. CultureX then runs its own set of robustness checks—seven in total—to identify companies that inflate their ratings by incentivising positive reviews or posting fraudulent ones. For this analysis, 5% of companies were dropped from the sample because of such concerns.

The goal of this kind of analysis, according to Don Sull, a co-founder of CultureX and professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is not to push companies to adopt a single, homogenous culture, but rather to understand the cultural attributes that workers and managers care about, and to help workers with, say, a preference for an innovative and dynamic employer, or who care especially about work-life balance, to match up with suitable firms.■