Job satisfaction and employee turnover determinants in Fortune 50 companies: Insights from employee reviews from Indeed.com

Abstract

Abstract An important aspect of human resource management is understanding employees values, motivations, and factors of satisfaction. Relationships between employee satisfaction, values, positivity and negativity, employee retention, and industry allow human resource managers to make decisions on employee recruitment techniques and budgets, employee retention efforts, and even company image initiatives. Traditional methods for identifying employee values, job satisfaction, and linkages to important company outcomes are through employee entrance/exit surveys, annual evaluations, and informal interactions. In recent years, companies and researchers have begun to take advantage of the increasing ubiquity of online reviews, including unstructured text responses. In this paper we explore 682,176 employee reviews of Fortune 50 companies from Indeed.com using Structural Topic Modeling (STM) to identify salient aspects in employee reviews and automatically infer latent topics that are salient factors related to employee satisfaction. We compare these topics with the five facets of the Job Descriptive Index (JDI) that are traditionally used to measure job satisfaction among human resource experts. We conduct further analysis comparing comments of current vs. former employees. Results suggests that management may be an important salient factor in employee satisfaction and turnover, as it is consistently mentioned by current and former employees in both positive and the negative comments. Similarly, monetary benefits are mentioned as a negative by former employees, but as a positive for current employees. Furthermore, we examine topic differences by industry sector and find that retail employees frequently mention Pay and Benefits and Length of Breaks, whereas technology sector employees were more concerned with Work-Life Balance. Our results can be used to support company behavioral management decision makers to conceive and evaluate initiatives intended to enhance employee satisfaction. Furthermore, our techniques, including the visualization of topic composition and quality, are generalizable to any setting that uses topic discovery from unstructured text, such as customer reviews, social media posts, and critic reviews, especially when comparing topics across entities.