Machine Learning Method Amplifies 'Voice of the People' to Model Workplace Culture

Human resources professionals and job seekers alike may soon be able to better understand a company's unique organizational culture thanks to a new machine-learning approach. Developed by Georgia Tech researchers, the approach is the first of its kind to computationally model organizational culture using publicly available anonymized data sources – including Glassdoor user reviews. These models are illustrated using heat maps that reveal positive and negative sentiment for a company and its business units across 41 dimensions of organizational culture. The heat maps give a "cloud-contributed" sense of what the culture is like in a particular workplace and can provide actionable insights to HR teams, unit managers, and job seekers, according to the researchers. "Right now, to get a measure of organizational culture, companies rely on internal surveys, which are difficult to scale. It's also unlikely that they are getting true responses given factors like organizational bias or employee concerns about anonymity," said Vedant Das Swain, a second-year Ph.D. student studying human-computer interaction at Georgia Tech.