Quantifying company reviews to see if Aritzia jobs are in vogue

Glassdoor company reviews offer employers an interesting perspective into employee experience. While primarily targeted at prospective employees and often used as a chance to vent, nonetheless this feedback can inform organizations about areas of dissatisfaction as effectively as employee surveys.

However, people analytics teams don’t have time to manually comb through every review. That’s where text analytics software comes into its own. By conducting reviews analysis utilizing tools like Relative Insight, you can rapidly pinpoint the insights contained within company reviews. Automating this process also removes bias from analysis, an important factor given the emotional impact the negative skew of Glassdoor reviews could have on people analytics team members processing reviews manually.

To demonstrate, Relative Insight gathered Glassdoor reviews about fashion brand Aritzia. Within minutes of uploading this text data, the reviews were split into the following groups for analysis:

5* reviews vs 1* reviews
Managers vs associates
Shop staff vs head office employees

This enabled the platform to calculate quantifiable variations between each of these employee groups using Relative difference. Analyzing text data offers context into the why behind the what. Communicating the why with measurable metrics offers a more compelling case for stakeholders to take action based on these insights.

In this example, delving into Glassdoor reviews offered an insight into how Aritzia can alter existing policies to enhance employee experience.

1* and 5* ratings demonstrate polarized view of culture

Company reviews posted by current and former employees, whether 1* or 5*, surfaced a clear culture within Aritzia. Reviewers’ different perspectives surrounding this culture is what defined whether they scored the retail chain positively or negatively.

For employees rating it highly, this is a high performance environment which extracts everything from them. They were 9.5x more likely to talk about their ‘growth’ within the role, while also highlighting the ‘opportunities’ available 8.6x more. These reviewers were 3.4x more likely to describe the working environment as ‘competitive’, noting infinitely more that it benefited people who are ‘aspirational’ and ‘ambitious’.

“There are many opportunities for advancement, and growth and learning is a big part of the work environment and culture.“

In contrast, those who gave 1* company reviews described this environment as ‘toxic’ 6.8x more. For them, competition led to words linked to the emotion ‘frustration’ appearing in their reviews infinitely more, such as ‘aggressive’, ‘hostile’ and ‘pressurized’. They were also infinitely more likely to describe the workplace as a ‘catty environment’.

“Promotes an aggressive, catty environment, nasty attitudes all around.“

Disconnect between managers and associates

The Relative Insight platform can segment text responses using other data points included within reviews. On Glassdoor, this includes reviewers’ job titles. In this example, we split company reviews between managers and associates at the fashion brand to ascertain whether seniority impacted employees’ view of the business. This revealed a significant disconnect between the two.

Many associates stressed that their key motivation was the employee discount. They were 2.6x more likely to talk about this than managers, highlighting that it’s a key selling point for those looking to work there.

“Amazing discount, gift cards, free items. They try to make up for the mental torment with free stuff and discounts.”

However, managers complained that they were having to manage employees only motivated by the discount, rather than meeting their sales targets, creating ‘retention’ issues – which they discussed infinitely more. They also talked about associates’ ‘sales targets’ 3.2x more, suggesting that managers are more concerned about these metrics than the associates who own these goals.

“Retention is hard. Associates need to be told before they start the job about the seriousness of hitting sales goals.“

“People would start the job for the discount/environment and not deliver, or then act surprised when management pushed them to deliver on sales expectations.“

Perhaps associates’ focus on discounts is down to a lack of future prospects with the company. This group complained of ‘favoritism’, using the word infinitely more, claiming that promotion and pay rises were decided based upon who managers liked, rather than unbiased performance measures.

“Promotions are based on favoritism, not experience. A lot of false promises are made by higher ups regarding promotions, hours and raises, but follow through is rare.“

Teamwork in head office; individualism in stores

Relative Insight also split this set of Glassdoor company reviews by shop floor and head office roles. This uncovered a distinction in how people operated within both environments.

Head office personnel had good things to say about co-workers in company reviews. Rather than being their friend, there was respect for their talent – they were 78.4x more likely to refer to fellow employees as ‘talented’. They also described them as ‘smart’ 39.2x more, again demonstrating their admiration for colleagues.

Their use of language also suggested that they operated in a more collaborative environment. They used the words ‘team’ and ‘we’ 13.6x and 4.8x more respectively, emphasizing that they considered they people they work with as colleagues, rather than competition.

“It is inspiring to work with so many smart, talented and passionate people!“

In contrast, Glassdoor reviews from shop floor workers presented an individualistic, dog-eat-dog environment. These reviewers used singular personal pronouns ‘I’ 2.5x more and ‘me’ infinitely more.

The focus on self also extended to behavior with co-workers. This group were infinitely more likely to say the people they work with were ‘rude’, and used the word ‘steal’ 13.7x more about them, alleging that they regularly stole deals and customers from them.

“Hard to trust your co-workers as they often steal your clients so they can make a sale.“

Actionable insights from company reviews

By gathering, segmenting and analyzing Glassdoor reviews, Relative Insight has identified positive and negative aspects about working for Aritzia. Using these quantified insights, the fashion firm can take clear actions to improve employee experience.

The high performance, high growth, high opportunity environment is a key area for talent attraction teams to amplify. While this culture doesn’t appeal to some, talent teams should emphasize ambition and aspiration within job ads and seek these desired traits when screening and interviewing candidates to ensure culture fit.

However, there are simple changes the company can make to mitigate the byproducts of this environment. To encourage collaboration between shop floor staff and prevent co-workers stealing customers, the firm could set team or store-wide targets to incentivize people to pull in the same direction.

In terms of progression, the brand should implement transparent career development frameworks so that employees know exactly what it takes to get promoted. This would reduce accusations of favoritism by managers, plus give employees something to work towards, rather than simply staying at Artizia for the discount.

Using text analysis software like Relative Insight to surface insights quickly and without bias from employee reviews, gathered internally or from sites like Glassdoor, offers people analytics teams another way of understand employees. Find out how Relative Insight can improve employee experience at your organization through a free trial.