Vocabularies of Highly Engaged Companies
And their counterparts
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One of the most exciting things about working at Culture Amp is having access to a bunch of data that has eluded business organizations since the beginning of time: aggregated, raw, glorious data about people at work.
It means the capacity to discover meaning, or identify trends that impact the way we understand things like company culture, the workplace, and the relationship between people and work.
One of the more interesting data points we collect are from the optional free-form text question portion of the survey. People are able to input anything they’d like, giving them a confidential sounding board to express concerns or give feedback to their organization. The comments are a powerful indicator of what topics and concepts people are talking about.
So, with this data in hand, we wanted to answer a basic question: What are highly-engaged companies most vocal about?
(Read our primer on employee engagement here, but the 5-second version of engagement is “The level of connection, motivation and commitment a person feels for the place they work.”)
Methodology
We began by identifying the top and bottom 20 scoring companies on Overall Engagement from our 2016 New Tech Benchmark.
We then looked at the word vocabularies from the free-form replies of the 5 baseline Engagement questions after stripping down all punctuation, removing stop-words such as I, the, and is before running statistical analysis. This is a collection of over 2,000 comments spanning 60,000+ words.
(If you’re into text analytics, we didn’t use stemming or lemmatization, because the word benefits is very different from the singular benefit; motivation different from motivate.)
Using a measure of frequency called Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency, we assigned scores to the top 500 words that appeared in each segment. TF-IDF is a relative measure which accounts for how often a word comes up per single comment, then normalizes it by how many companies’ comments contain the word. The scores we present are the average TF-IDF score and their relative rank, across two sets of twenty companies, each set with its own top 500 terms.
TL;DR — We rank the average relative scores of the top 500 words from the top and bottom 20 scoring New Tech companies in Engagement.
First, a visual illustration of the ranking of the top 100 words for disengaged companies (left) corresponding to term’s ranking at highly-engaged companies.
I want to note that higher ranking does not mean better. For example, the word paid ranks 169 for low-engaged companies, but doesn’t show up in the top 500 words of any of the high-engagement companies. This doesn’t mean that employees at lower-engaged companies are paid more. It only means the specific word dominates more of the conversation in our engagement surveys.
Even before any deep analysis of the scores, it’s plain to see that there are big differences in word use between low- and high-engaged companies. Because of this, we suspect that there are many strong links between engagement and vocabulary.
Here are some of our initial findings.
Work, Company, and People
The three most frequently appearing words in our employment engagement survey are work, company, and people — the holy trinity of the workplace. No surprise there. However, we found that disengaged companies are more vocal about company-related issues, whereas the term people was favored by the engaged.
We also found the relative gap between the use of terms company and people is much larger at disengaged companies. Disengaged companies use the word company much more. Or perhaps, it could be said that engaged companies simply don’t have as many company-related issues or concerns to bring up as it pertains to engagement.
One thing is for sure: highly-engaged workforces are more concerned with people than any other topic besides work.
On the Topic of Culture…
The cliches seem to hold up — culture is a topic highly-engaged companies are more vocal about. Culture is ranked 11th at engaged companies, the first word to have such a significant gap. For less engaged companies, culture ranks 58th, ranking slightly under pay (56th).
Other than perhaps love (10th overall), no other word at the top of the list carries more weight (see: place, great, I’m, working, think, job). And no higher ranked word can be attributed more to the differences between a highly-engaged company and one that is disengaged.
My hunch is these organizations are more vocal about culture in general, spending more time talking in-person about culture in the workplace. And this open discussion fosters awareness, leading to change and reinforcement of cultural values.
Are We Colleagues or Friends?
One of the most notable and interpretable gaps we’ve found between the two sets of companies is the frequency of the word colleagues. In engaged companies, people are far more likely to use the word friends, and far less likely to refer to people as colleagues. And the difference is one of the largest differences we’ve found, 53rd vs 371st — this is a factor ~5x (0.035365 vs 0.007057) in terms of frequency score.
Opinions differ on the boundaries between work-colleagues and work-friends, but our data show stronger personal bonds appear to have a link to better-engaged companies. Despite a downward trend of work friendships, the research seems to show that amongst those with friendships at work, “their job is more fun, enjoyable, worthwhile, and satisfying.”
The (In)tangibles
And despite the rave reviews about on-campus cafeterias and the incredible perks of many Silicon Valley companies (many of which are companies we work with and represented in this analysis), we found that when it comes to engagement, food and perks are not a major part of the narrative.
The terms food and perks are only represented at highly-engaged companies, and we suspect that those perks are pretty generous. However, when compared with intangible concepts such as environment, friends, and culture; perks and food are far behind.
Pour Conclure
This is only the tip of the iceberg in better understanding employee engagement. But the initial research seems to say highly-engaged companies share these traits:
- People over company
- Culture at the forefront
- Friends more than colleagues
- Environment over perks
One way to interpret this is to say the trend seems to lean more on intangibles such as people, culture, and friendship as being drivers of engagement at work. As employee perks start to disappear, and work engagement becomes an increasingly talked-about topic, it’s important to shift the conversation away from what we can offer to people (the tangibles), but what we can do to foster connection, motivation, and commitment.
For now, I’ll leave you with this quote from Richard Branson:
… If the person who works at your company is 100% proud of the job they’re doing, if you give them the tools to do a good job, they’re proud of the brand, if they were looked after, if they’re treated well, then they’re gonna be smiling, they’re gonna be happy and therefore the customer will have a nice experience.
