Capturing the Difference between Former and Current Employees' Emotional Attitudes based on the Online Reviews

Abstract

We take current and former employees as research objects, and analyze the textual and numerical data according to 41,000 anonymous reviews of employees from Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google employees, which is collected from a workplace community, the Glassdoor website, that provides company reviews. We discuss the differences between former and current employees' needs for each of the four companies based on reviews on the Overall Rating of the employees and the five dimensions (Work/Life Balance, Culture & Values, Senior Management, Career Opportunities and Salary & Benefits). The results reveal that the current employees prioritize Work/Life Balance and Senior Management, while former employees value the company's Senior Management the most. Next, we explore the textual data of former and current employees' comments on the company: a text mining analysis of the high-frequency vocabulary of positive and negative evaluations and employees' suggestions for the company, and it is found that current employees have positive comments on the Work/Life Balance of the company, former employees have positive evaluations of the company's Senior Management and Culture & Values and both current and former employees are not satisfied with the company's Senior Management.

Exploring Determinants of Job Satisfaction: A Comparison Between Survey and Review Data

“…However, although employees' behavior can be predicted by their intentions, there are cases in which intentions do not always lead to actual behavior (Ajzen, 1991), implying that it is difficult to perceive intention and behavior as same. According to Pan et al (2023), among job satisfaction factors, former employees consider management as most important, and current employees consider work-life balance and management as most important. Therefore, given the difference in job satisfaction factors that former versus current employees consider important, it is necessary to analyze former & current employees separately.…”