Organizations that lead their industries for cultural excellence | Hacker News Reader

Organizations that lead their industries for cultural excellence

sloanreview.mit.edu

57 pointssarapeyton19 comments

'The Culture 500 measures company performance across nine cultural values — agility, collaboration, customer orientation, diversity, execution, innovation, integrity, performance, and respect'.

I'd say this is dangerous, self serving nonsense by academics cargo culting what they think large corporations look like from outside. The valuation data is suspect (GlassDoor etc) and anyone who has worked inside any of these entities see through the identity politics pr signaling put out by corporate comms.

The only way to accurately gather data on companies is by exit poll, people who have left a company and have no skin in the game and possibly a dissenting opinion. I'd rather scale up my thoughts and views from criticism than try to make sense of this fluff

Also a stretch to assume the same values equally mean excellence for each company.

We do not assume that. Indeed we explicitly discuss why different companies could select different bundles of values.

> customer orientation

Is this what they mean? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick-fil-A_and_LGBT_people

The data is not external. It is based on NLP analysis of free text of reviews by current and former employees. The data is not based on corporate comms or PR.

About half of reviews are from former employees. Former employees' assessment of values correlates, on average, above 0.8 with current emplooyees' assessment of the same values.

Interesting how you feel entitled to dismiss as "nonsense" and "fluff" without any understanding of underlying methodology or data.

I like this idea and it's very nicely presented but I note a lack of diversity in it's data sources:

based on more than 1.4 million Glassdoor reviews

Let's not forget GlassDoor has come under criticism for gaming, including recently highlighted on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24789865

It’s just bullshit. I’ve worked for 2 of the companies in the list and they both presume to have the highest values and a nice ethic codes. They even promote things like “if you need more time to do the assigned work, don’t do overtime, report to your manager and the case will be assessed...”. But then in reality the employees keep doing a big amount of unpaid extra hours.

Why is that? Because the ethic code is only to show off, but internally there is continuous pressure on the people and not doing overtime will be punished one way or another.

I think hubspot is an interesting inclusion after reading the Dan Lyons books.

> I think hubspot is an interesting inclusion after reading the Dan Lyons books.

Context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11369632

I'm really curious about this pattern of making rules and then not following them. It seems rampant and somehow fundamentally everything seems so dysfunctional.

Why should we trust your single point of view above tens of thousands reviews for those companies?

gaming unlikely to work in large companies for reasons described in this video. https://blog.culturex.com/why-you-cant-afford-to-dismiss-gla... More of a risk for small companies with few reviews.

I don't think this should be called cultural excellence. This should be employee stated satisfaction.

Cultural excellence also implies it does good things for the world. Many of these examples are extremely unclear that they do much good (e.g. MasterCard with it's incredible tax).

the business/administration concept of culture has nothing to do with doing good things to the world directly. it's all about productivity and bottom line. I can remember quite clearly my teacher in uni saying: "So do you think companies go for diversity because it's 'the right thing to do'? Hell no!, they do it because it's proven to increase productivity". In situations where there is low offer of particular skills in the job market compared to the demand, "culture" will serve as a means of propaganda/enticing for future candidates and also for retaining current employees and not losing them to competitors.

That is one way to define cultural excellence, but certainly not the only. We start with an analysis of publicly-stated values of 560 large, mainly US companies. We then identified the most commonly cited values in this sample and measured the nine most commonly listed values. We then evaluate how well companies are doing against those values based on employees reviews.

Uh, wow. To say the least, this does not look like a reflection of reality. This looks a bit like a list of companies with PR problems who are working hard to whitewash their Glassdoor reviews, because they are having problems recruiting. I'm not saying they're all bad, but it looks closer to a list of companies with internal culture problems who would rather buy their way around the consequences of that, than really fix it.

"After rigorous analysis, our research team identified 21 companies that are head and shoulders above their industries for using what we call the Big 9 values. These Culture Champions produce vibrant, multifaceted cultures that succeed spectacularly for their employees."

-- They called it culture... I think it would be interesting to analyse the employee burnout data on these companies

Maybe this is presented badly, but of the strengths some of the companies have if you click on them and view their scores it doesn't seem to properly reflect that?

e.g. one of them has Integrity as very low as rated by internal employees (unsure how it is relatively) and yet is listed as a core strength.

culturewashing?

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