Charlie Sull – How AI Can Actually Measure Company Culture

Connect with Charlie:

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Connect with David:

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• david.turetsky@salary.com

Connect with Dwight:

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• dwight.brown@salary.com

Podcast Team

• HRDataLabs@Salary.com

Production by Affogato Media

Resources:

• Salary.com Consulting practice
• HR Data Labs Season 9 Episode 24
• HR Data Labs Season 9 Episode 22

• “[With traditional 1-to-5-point scale surveys] you’re not getting any information. If you’re trying to measure company culture with this robotic, repetitive low quality data, you just can’t understand . . . what your employees are saying.”

Announcer 0:01

The world of business is more complex than ever. The world of human resources and compensation is also getting more complex. Welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast, your direct source for the latest trends from experts inside and outside the world of human resources. Listen as we explore the impact that compensation strategy, data and people analytics can have on your organization. This podcast is sponsored by Salary.com Your source for data technology and consulting for compensation and beyond. Now here are your hosts, David Turetsky and Dwight Brown.

 

David Turetsky 0:38

Hello and welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast. I'm your host, David Turetsky. We're gonna have a bloopers reel from that first couple of takes this morning. I am David Turetsky, your host, alongside my best friend, co host and partner@salary.com, Dwight Brown. Dwight, how are you?

 

Dwight Brown 0:52

David? I'm pretty good. It's a Monday, so as good as it gets on a Monday,

 

David Turetsky 0:53

You should have had a pistachio muffin like me?

 

Dwight Brown 1:01

Yeah, that's yeah, and we'd really be keyed up.

 

David Turetsky 1:05

Yes, we would. But we're even more keyed up. You know, why

 

Dwight Brown 1:08

Tell me

 

David Turetsky 1:08

We have an exciting guest today. Charlie Sull. Charlie, how are you?

 

Charlie Sull 1:12

I'm doing good. Thanks. No muffins for me, but I'm all good. But you've had some really amazing Colombian coffee. I imagine it's interesting. Actually, Columbia, where I live, by the way, exports all of its best coffee. So it's actually kind of hard to get a great cup of coffee in Colombia,

 

David Turetsky 1:29

Really.

 

Dwight Brown 1:30

Yeah, I can attest to that.

 

Charlie Sull 1:33

Wow. That stinks. Well, I would, I would actually go into the jungles to get it, if I had to, because I love fresh coffee.

 

Yeah,

 

Dwight Brown 1:44

Not where you want to be going,

 

David Turetsky 1:48

for lots of reasons, I imagine.

 

Dwight Brown 1:50

Yeah.

 

David Turetsky 1:50

Charlie, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself.

 

Charlie Sull 1:53

So over the past 10 years, I've been researching corporate culture at MIT. So we launched the largest ever research study in the corporate culture at least measured by a number of employee voices heard from and in the process, we developed a new way of measuring corporate culture that doesn't use the one to five point scale that a lot of people still use. It uses AI and analyzes textual feedback to understand what employees are actually saying.

 

David Turetsky 2:25

Wow. Talk about large language model.

 

Dwight Brown 2:27

Yeah.

 

David Turetsky 2:28

So do you have any published research that we might be able to have people take a look at?

 

Charlie Sull 2:32

Yeah, a lot of our research is published in the measuring Culture Series on MIT Sloan Management Review. This was actually their the most read series in their publications history, and it goes through answers a lot of questions. What? What drives the employee experience the most powerfully? What is toxic culture? How do you measure it? To companies walk the talk on culture. I think we have about 10 articles in that one now.

 

David Turetsky 2:32

Oh, wow,

 

Dwight Brown 2:32

wow.

 

David Turetsky 2:32

Yeah, if you could give us links to it so we can put it in the show notes, that would be really awesome. I think a lot think a lot of people would probably love to read those things.

 

Charlie Sull 3:05

Definitely

 

David Turetsky 3:06

Perfect. So Charlie, like we do, for every one of our guests, what's one fun thing that no one knows about Charlie?

 

Charlie Sull 3:13

What's one fun thing that no one knows about me? All right, I forget what I wrote in the response I sent to you guys. I guess, something I don't I mean, people know this about me, but I don't widely publicize it, but I'm, I'm a terrible driver. I grew up in England where, admittedly, the the driving test is very hard in England, because there are all these roundabouts and you're driving on the wrong side of the road and everything. But I failed my driving test five times in England, and I didn't learn how to drive until I was 23 years old. So that's, that's a fun thing.

 

David Turetsky 3:45

wow, wow, I actually have my driver's license from England.

 

Charlie Sull 3:50

Oh, you got it there?

 

David Turetsky 3:51

Yes, I lived there for a few years and got it. And you're right, it is very tough. It was especially tough for a kid from the US who had never driven a standard before, and it was all standard at that point, still no automatics and driving up Pembroke hill with a million cars beeping their horns as loudly as they possibly could, I was with my driver's test exam and trying to pass my exam on a Hill. That was the first time, Charlie. So I failed too once, but I got it the second time. But yeah, yeah. So good. So you have a chauffeur in Columbia, then

 

Charlie Sull 4:31

we do, yeah, we have a driver. We don't have a car here. It's all these windy log and winding roads. So yeah, we have a driver.

 

David Turetsky 4:41

There you go. I'm aspiring to have that as well. Although I am a chauffeur to my children, and they're they typically refer to me as David when we're in the car, because I'm their driver, their Uber driver. I get no tips, and I get less than five stars almost every single time.

 

Charlie Sull 4:58

Do they just. Sit in the back and you're the driver in the front, and

 

David Turetsky 5:03

if I got my mother in the car, she'd tell me exactly how to drive. But that's that's a conversation from the other podcast. Today's topic is going to be a really cool one, because, as you mentioned in your research, you talk about cultural measurement, and we're going to be talking about how to use AI to understand and improve corporate culture.

 

So Charlie, our first question is, why would anyone care about cultural measurement?

 

Charlie Sull 5:36

Yeah, that's a great question that I come into a lot. Okay, so cultural measurement is incredibly esoteric. When I tell people, I basically devoted my life to cultural measurement, it's, you know, a hard conversation at parties for the most part, the reasonable

 

David Turetsky 5:52

After a couple of drinks, I'm sure it's really fun,

 

Charlie Sull 5:56

yeah, then I

 

Dwight Brown 5:57

really interesting insights come out.

 

Charlie Sull 6:02

No, okay, so maybe you don't care about cultural measurement, like most people, that's fine, but there is a good chance if you work for a business, or if you're interested in business, you care about culture. Sure, and there are many reasons to think about culture. I mean, it's it's the number one driver of employee satisfaction, three times as powerful as compensation as we found. I mean, it, it shapes everything about you know, what, what you do at work, what, what your how your company's treating you, all these different outcomes, all these outcomes that affect strategy execution, like, is the company Agile? Is it Innovative? Culture? Culture matters, and a lot of people think that. So there's a good study at Duke done surveyed about 1400 CEOs and CFOs from big companies, CEOs, CFOs, not CHROs, CEOs, CFOs, and it found that the majority, 54% thought that culture was the top three driver of financial value creation out of anything imaginable. And you know culture matters. I mean, just go on LinkedIn, there are all these posts about culture. Everyone's talking about culture. Everyone, everyone knows on some level that culture matters. But everyone also knows that culture is incredibly intangible, ethereal, even you know it's this, people don't even know what it is if you, if you read the literature reviews of academics and culture academics over the past 40 years, reality is they've spent almost all their time just arguing about what the definition of culture even is, right there isn't even consensus about that. So what, what actually is culture? And the reason culture cultural measurement matters is because cultural measurement is the bridge between something that almost everyone could agree matters a tremendous amount, and this ethereality, this intangibility culture, cultural measurement is what allows you to actually make culture tangible and quantifiable. And the upside of that is, if you can make culture tangible and quantifiable, then it becomes much easier to manage. And my hope is that culture will pretty soon become as easy to manage as any other very important asset in a company that people already devoting a lot of resources to, you know, taking seriously.

 

Dwight Brown 8:22

You know, to that point, one thing that you said at the beginning there really kind of struck me. You said that CHROs were not part of that study, which is interesting, because if you, if you want to look at who's knee deep in culture in a company, right? It's your CHRO!

 

Charlie Sull 8:41

Yeah. Well, I think CHROs, 100% of them would say that that culture matters most. CHROs think that culture matters. The people you got convinced are the CEOs and CFOs,

 

Dwight Brown 8:50

Okay,

 

David Turetsky 8:51

But, but Charlie isn't a lot of culture marketing as well. I mean, it's branding, it's it's how people feel about you, not just the employees, but how your customers and stakeholders and owners feel about you.

 

Charlie Sull 9:04

I mean, a lot of culture nowadays is just, you know, PR bullshit. If I can say that frankly, it's, it's, you know, going out

 

David Turetsky 9:12

What is the term you used, it started with a B and then had an S in it. No, but seriously, so that is, that is what a lot of people think it is. It's the BS that we get fed

 

Charlie Sull 9:23

It's exactly right. It's companies going on their LinkedIn page and saying, Oh, we care about our employees so much we're this and that we're this and that. And the reason why such BS is allowed to fester is because there isn't any good measurement, if there was some reliable system of measurement and saying, oh, actually you think you care about your employees. How come employees are two standard deviations less likely to say you care about them than your competitors. And if there was a, you know, a widely regarded metric for that, then this so so much of culture is just complete nonsense. So much of it is just complete. Nonsense, and a lot of that comes back to measurement.

 

David Turetsky 10:03

But before we get into the cultural part, in the measurement part, sorry, the measurement part, when we see things like, you know, corporate statements coming from Apple or from Google or from Amazon, let's take those, because those are three gigantic organisms in the US, right? Every, every, not only every household knows those names. They live them on a daily basis, and their culture affects the United States and how we live, probably as well around the world, but much more so in the US and the culture of them have been very much led by the three people, or, in the case of Google, it changes a little bit, but, but, but that's isn't that kind of what leads culture is the heads and the leaders of those organizations, more so than even the marketing, because Tim could go to, you know, the White House, a White House dinner with Donald Trump, and that affects how that brand is then judged from a cultural perspective. No, positive and negative. I'm not being political there.

 

Charlie Sull 11:07

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the top team of a company, especially the CEO, is going to have by far the most outsized influence on the culture. I mean, we It sounds like you're maybe talking a little bit about brand and external reputation, which is affected by culture, sure, but we think of culture as a company's operating system. So culture is the system that's determining 1000s of different important algorithms in the company. So for instance, one algorithm that culture determines is my direct report, just did something stupid. Is it okay for me to lose my temper and yell at him? Yes or no, yes or no? And you can see how that would create a very different culture of respect around the company, or a different algorithm is around agility. Say you're a distributed manager in Sweden, and you just noticed that market conditions have just changed really rapidly in Sweden. So the question is, do I take ownership for that? Do I proactively respond to that and and handle this on my own, or do I report back to headquarters and wait a couple of weeks for their decision to to respond this market conditions. So that's a that's an algorithm around agility and ownership.

 

David Turetsky 12:25

But lately, wouldn't that stretch into like? Like we've seen with Facebook and other other companies, how they decide on letting people go, and how they make those public pronouncements about them, like, for example, the these are performance based layoffs versus what the reality was, was they were just riffing people to, you know, hit better corporate numbers.

 

Charlie Sull 12:49

Yes. I mean, that's, that's definitely, it's definitely going to have an impact on culture. I mean, you can read what Meta employees are saying on on Glassdoor. They're going to be criticizing things like fairness, criticizing the extent to which performance is rewarded. Those criticizing strategy, those, those, those will all certainly impact culture.

 

Announcer 13:11

Like what you hear so far. Make sure you never miss a show by clicking subscribe. This podcast is made possible by Salary.com. Now back to the show.

 

David Turetsky 13:22

Why don't we shift now to, like, one of the more fascinating things to us, I'm sure Dwight is on pins and needles for this one, which is, how is it actually measured? How is culture actually measured? And what are you actually trying to change with that measurement?

 

Charlie Sull 13:37

Well, what we're trying to change with this measurement is, you know, my, this is my Lex Luthor or something. I've devoted my life to trying to kill me about it. I'm a little bit crazy about this, I admit. But the enemy is, is this survey that you're all familiar with. It comes from 1932 it's nearly a century old technology, and how it works is you ask employees on a scale of one to five, do you agree with this? Do you agree with this? Do you agree with this? And on and on for dozens of questions, maybe over 100 questions. And this is how you understand what they think, right? And you can just see off the off the top of the bat. This is just a crazy way of understanding ideas, right? You just, you get employees to say, 555543555, that's just not that's not human. And the only reason we're still doing it that way is because the technology hasn't come around to, you know, allow our humanity to flourish, but these surveys have, they just don't work, is the main reason not to do them. So when employees are faced with these questions, they go on autopilot, and they answer almost every question with almost the same answer. We did a study of 900,000 of these survey responses. The average respondent is answering about 90% of questions with the same two answers. It's just. Because you're not getting any information. And if what you're trying to measure is culture, which is incredibly sophisticated, incredibly multi dimensional, incredibly complex, it has all these different moving parts, and it's fundamentally human. If you're trying to measure that with this robotic, really repetitive, low quality data, you just can't understand what's going on. And that's the true tragedy right now, most companies are still doing it this way. They don't even know what their employees are saying, you know?

 

David Turetsky 15:27

Or they're looking for an answer, or they're looking for that five,

 

Dwight Brown 15:31

Yeah,

 

David Turetsky 15:32

How we're kind of trying to get across the board, right? Yeah,

 

Charlie Sull 15:35

That's, that's a great point. They're just looking for validation that the employees are going to write four to fives to everything which they which they do. So, yeah, so how we do it is just really simple. I mean, the technology is complicated, but the the approach is really simple. You just listen to what employees say when they write a review. You listen to what topics they mention, and you understand, are they talking about the topics positively or negatively, and you just, you hear that message, and it's just advanced text analytics. That's all it is.

 

Dwight Brown 16:09

It is interesting how, when you start to put two and two together, how just asking the questions you do, lose so much of what's behind that, you know, and and I think a lot of that is just, it's unconscious in the minds of the people who are answering the questions, but now being led that technology where you can get sentiment analysis and some of those other pieces that you don't get just asking questions, and especially Not questions that give you five choices. And so this does seem pretty groundbreaking in terms of of what you're doing and how you're measuring it,

 

David Turetsky 16:48

but, but let me, let me ask a different question, though, inside of what Dwight just asked, Where are you getting the data from to be able to do what Dwight said, like, where Charlie? Where's the data coming? Is there coming from glass door? Because we know that a lot of people kvetch, you know, complain. You know, on glass door there's, there's more emphasis on the fetch than there is on the compliment.

 

Charlie Sull 17:13

So if you think everyone's just going on glass door to complain, what percentage of reviews do you think are negative on glass door?

 

David Turetsky 17:22

Probably 60%

 

Dwight Brown 17:23

95

 

David Turetsky 17:24

No, not 95 really 95 you think I would think, Okay, I think it's like 65%

 

Charlie Sull 17:30

the actual answer is 18% and and 63% of reviews are five star and four star reviews. Glassdoor is not a negatively biased platform. Yeah?

 

Dwight Brown 17:41

Interesting.

 

Charlie Sull 17:44

The opposite, yeah. Everyone thinks the opposite, yeah.

 

David Turetsky 17:47

What about Yelp?

 

Charlie Sull 17:48

Yelp is much more polarized because it doesn't have the what makes glassware so unpolarized is their give to get policy. So if you want to have access to the reviews, you have to leave your own reviews, which is going to incentivize more sensible people to write reviews, versus with Yelp, oh, I had a really great experience already Yelp review. Oh, I had a terrible experience. I'll definitely write a Yelp review, and you're getting mostly extremely polarized reviews. But with Glassdoor, there have been studies done, it's actually one of the least polarized review platforms of any kind on the internet,

 

David Turetsky 18:25

and is that the only place that you pull the data from?

 

Charlie Sull 18:27

No we also work with clients internal data. So it's we Glassdoors, is how we did this, this huge research study that was talking about that's all Glassdoor data, but then to understand what's going on the company to understand, for instance, things like, where within the company is the issue you care about most pronounced, and ideas for how to fix it. Then we also do internal data, but you can learn a lot just from glass door.

 

Dwight Brown 18:53

Interesting. Yeah, yeah. I totally would have thought the opposite.

 

David Turetsky 18:56

Yeah a lot of the organizations I've been a part of, it is been the opposite. It's been where most of the reviews I've seen have been negative in nature. But I won't be mentioning the name of those companies, by the way, but to protect the innocent or not in this case,

 

Charlie Sull 19:14

well, if there really is a company where 65% of the reviews are negative, then there's information in that,

 

Dwight Brown 19:21

yeah,

 

David Turetsky 19:25

but, but, I guess the question I'm asking you is, you know, you're using natural language models, you're using text analysis, you're you're doing a lot to try and dig into the sentiment that drives what People believe about their culture. Correct.

 

Charlie Sull 19:40

Correct.

 

David Turetsky 19:41

Is there validation on from, from using those studies you were talking about before that are not as great, or you don't, you don't really approve of the of that, of that methodology. Do you, do you actually ever do an analysis to see what the correlations are?

 

Charlie Sull 20:00

yeah, so I I'm wary of getting too much into the weeds of analyzing these old studies. But basically, in a 50 question, old fashioned study, there for most of the questions, the employees are just answering it completely the same, and you basically can't tell any information. But there are probably going to be three or four questions, where the employees care about those questions so much that they break, they break autopilot, and they go out of their way to give a either an extremely positive or an extremely negative answer. So for you know, so it's a minute special way of doing it, but for a 50 question survey, you can get maybe three or four good answers,

 

David Turetsky 20:41

sure,

 

Charlie Sull 20:42

and then yeah, then you can compare that to the free tax. And sure enough, the free tax said, yeah. Like, obviously, I already knew that.

 

Dwight Brown 20:50

So the data that you're getting from inside the companies tell me a little bit more about that.

 

Charlie Sull 20:57

It's so most companies, when they do an engagement survey, they will, I don't even know why they do this, but they'll include a couple of free text questions that they didn't, then don't analyze. It's pretty funny, actually. Like, I've seen cases where, like, huge companies watching 500 companies, they don't even translate the free text data, right? So they don't. It's not even in the same language that that the analysts can read, that's that's how unseriously they treat this but, but nevertheless, they do ask those questions, and then, or most of the time, they do, and then we analyze them.

 

Dwight Brown 21:33

I remember in a past life when I was a manager, and even when I wasn't on the manager side, we did employee satisfaction surveys, and the surveys always felt like a joke because there was free text you that where employees could comment, but then what they would do is they would aggregate this huge cloud of information and provide feedback about your managerial unit, or whatever it was, and it was, it never was useful because it was so over generalized, and, you know, and and we knew why they were doing it. They were trying to protect the employee. But it, it's just really detracted from, from the value of doing that survey, and was really unhelpful, right? Exactly?

 

Charlie Sull 22:32

They still, you'd be surprised how prevalent word clouds are, even today. Oh my god, what a joke. But yeah, they're, they're all over the place. Yeah.

 

David Turetsky 22:42

It's awful, because you have so much value in so much of that data, and it's such a waste of time that could be so better spent being able to actually get what people really feel. And I think with the advent of more generative AI and text based conversational AI, we should be able to ask people more readily. Hey, Dwight, how's your day going? How do you feel about work today? Right? Not in an intrusive way, but in a you know, how can we make your life better? You know, let's, let's ask some questions that matter to the employee, that that might be able to turn around some usable context. Sorry, that was a that was a kvetch myself, so I apologize.

 

Charlie Sull 23:29

Yeah, that's the hope. But it comes back to leadership prioritization. If the Leadership isn't interested in doing this in the first place, it's never going to happen, or maybe they'll ask the question, but they won't even care about the results. So it's the technology is there in 2025 the technology is there. It's just up for people to take it.

 

David Turetsky 23:47

Hey, are you listening to this and thinking to yourself, Man, I wish I could talk to David about this. Well, you're in luck. We have a special offer for listeners of the HR Data Labs podcast, a free half hour call with me about any of the topics we cover on the podcast or whatever is on your mind. Go to salary.com/hrdlconsulting to schedule your FREE 30 minute call today.

 

Let's transition then to Why is AI a better way of measuring culture? We use we talk about that term, AI, all the time on this program. Why is now the time and why is this the correct methodology?

 

Charlie Sull 24:29

Well, AI has a number of advantages over this old fashioned, Likert approach. So for starters, Well for starters, since the century, more advanced technology, but then it doesn't have this autopilot effect. So whenever employees are consciously expressing their language, even if they're just very terse, even if they just say something like, pay me more, that's still valuable information, because they could have been talking about hundreds of different things they chose to talk about compensation, they're consciously. Expressing themselves. Another reason why AI is good is because you can express messages. So say you're taking a survey, the thing you really want to say is, my boss is micromanaging me and is driving me crazy with AI. The AI just says, Okay, got it. His boss is micromanaging them. He doesn't like that. That's the message, versus with this traditional survey, maybe one of the questions was about micromanagement, maybe a couple were about the boss. But it's impossible for the analysts on the other end of the survey to actually decipher that message, because there there are also dozens of other questions being asked. Another huge advantage in AI is that employees are going out of their way to not only identify issues, but also to explain how issues are breaking down, and even to offer actionable solutions for improving issues. And if you can understand this information, you it's much easier to actually fix the problem, so it's just a much more actionable methodology. And finally, the you know, everyone hates these long engagement surveys. They take like, 20 minutes, and they're so clunky. With an AI survey, it can be just what you said Dwight. It can be, you know, asking the the employee, what do you like about working here? Take 30 seconds to respond. What don't like take 30 seconds. It's just a lot shorter, a lot more, a lot more natural natural. So those are some of the advantages. And I think this will be the best approach for a while, because the only alternative I see that this is pretty dystopian, which is, let's analyze employees email as analyze their slack. Let's analyze the video footage and then get, get, get passive signals that way. But to me, I think that's just going to make the culture more toxic through the through the survey, method, through the listing mechanism itself. So I think this, this kind of consensual AI is a is a really happy middle ground that's that can be very effective.

 

David Turetsky 27:02

So Charlie, what's the platform by which this happens? Is it a is it an email they get that they click on a link and they go to a website, and it's the it's a an avatar, and they're chatting with the avatar. Is it a text based where they're just on their phones and they're, you know, the AI asks it three or four questions, and, you know, they're they're responding on the phone, hit submit, and they're done. Is this a, is this a thing that constantly keeps their pulse? What? What is the what's the technology and how does it manifest?

 

Charlie Sull 27:33

The exact survey mechanism doesn't really measure matter that much. You can do it on Slack. You can send a SMS. You can do it by email. You can do a more traditional survey platform. You just basically need some mechanism to ask the question, what do you like about working here? What don't like about working here? And allowed them to respond in free text. It's even possible to have a phone call and transcribe the phone call so that that that part of it you can do a lot of different ways. Then, then you want to analyze it on the AI platform.

 

David Turetsky 28:08

I'm more concerned about that interruption like AI than like HR is bothering me again. You know, I gotta take this survey, or I gotta do this, oh god, it's an HR thing. And and your mind and your your entire disposition changes because AI, sorry, HR is forcing you to do something. So it already puts you behind from a feeling perspective that, you know, this is a burden to me, so I'm going to give it, maybe give a crappy answer, or I'm going to, you know, get angry about it, or my emotion changes. Wouldn't we want to do it in the most natural way for that person who's answering, and that actually could be different by generation? No?

 

Charlie Sull 28:47

Yeah, I think there's a lot of room for improvement there. And I mean, you also have to consider there are going to be some cultures with elevated levels of toxicity where you have to design the entire thing around confidentiality. I mean, some, in some cases, will explicitly say, look, leadership from your company is never going to analyze your individual response. This is all going to an independent team to ensure psychological safety. So yeah, I mean, it's, you just got to get them, get them to write stuff down, then it becomes interesting. It's part of what I think. But of course, you're right.

 

Dwight Brown 29:25

I'm curious some of the findings that you've that you found. I mean, can you compare and contrast, like findings from two different companies, and were they? Were they strikingly different? Were they very much the same. What, what does it look like in terms of the output?

 

Charlie Sull 29:47

Oh, boy, yeah, you can, you can compare millions of different companies. And the thing is, no, no two cultures are exactly the light, exactly like each culture is like a snowflake or something. It has its own distinct patterns. There. You can combine any two cultures head to head and see exactly what employees speak about, more favorably, less favorably. You can see how the culture is changing over time. So for instance, for that, when you were talking about Jeff Bezos and successor, whatever his name is, it's pretty interesting, actually,

 

David Turetsky 30:22

It's amazing. We don't know that, but,

 

Charlie Sull 30:24

yeah, I do know it. I just can't. But Amazon is unique on Glassdoor because it has so many reviews. So each year, employees are writing maybe like 35,000 reviews. So you can really see at a very granny little level, exactly how the culture is changing. And what's interesting is Amazon historically, back when Bezos was CEO, it didn't it never had very good culture from an employee experience perspective. Employees never really loved working there that much. But what it did have a very good culture on was these leadership principles that are very core de to Amazon's identity. And you could measure that on Glassdoor. You could say, for instance, Amazon, compared to competitors, employees speak two standard deviations more favorably about customer orientation. For instance, what they call Customer obsession, and historically, on most of these leadership principles, they demonstrably did a very solid job. But what's interesting is, if you look at how the culture has changed only very recently, since, since Bezos stepped down as CEO, they're still pretty strong, but there's been a notable erosion in these core leadership principles that I would expect at least some someone in the company would, would find interesting. But anyway, that's an example of, you know, one of the many, many things you can do with this data.

 

David Turetsky 31:48

And I found it was Andy Jassy, by the way, Andy Jesse, not the household name yet, but...

 

Dwight Brown 31:54

Soon to be,

 

David Turetsky 31:55

Dwight, do you have follow up?

 

Dwight Brown 31:56

Yeah, the, you know, my mind is going right now, which is always dangerous. But I start to think about, I start to think about some of the utility kind of business case, utilities with this, and being able to take the culture, being able to take the information that you're getting from this study, number one, and then number two, replicating that. And you think about mergers, for example, like looking at that cultural aspect is probably one in one good indicator of success or failure of a merger.

 

Charlie Sull 32:33

Yeah, according to research by all the big consulting firms who do most of this merger work, like KPMG, Deloitte and all those McKinsey and everyone, there's consensus that culture is one of, if not the thing, most likely to derail a merger. And it's a very interesting use case, because now, right now, what you can do is just take the two companies, see exactly where the areas of culture fit are, exactly where the areas of culture mismatch are, and even how to improve the areas of culture mismatch, and it becomes a lot easier to manage that aspect of the transaction, but it's still in its early days.

 

David Turetsky 33:13

But is it easier in a specific industry to call out what those measurements of culture are, or what the characteristics of them are through using your your technique, or is it, am I overthinking it a little.

 

Charlie Sull 33:29

It's pretty much industry agnostic, at least, how we designed the platform. So how our platform was built is we analyzed all this glass door, you know, million millions of glass door reviews. And we built topics so that anytime an employee mentions something above, something like 0.05% of the time, or even smaller, you can pick up on it. So it's at least how we built it. You can pretty much cover any imaginable cultural topic from any industry. And then, if there is industry or organization specific language, the AI can also pick up on that. And then then you can update the models to accommodate the new language.

 

David Turetsky 34:11

Is there any particular cultural characteristic that rises above the others when it comes to employee sentiment?

 

Charlie Sull 34:20

Yeah, toxic culture. Toxic culture is by far the biggest driver of employee satisfaction, or dissatisfaction.

 

David Turetsky 34:27

Wow. What's the least that you found?

 

Charlie Sull 34:29

The least impactful on employee satisfaction? There are a lot of contrast well, I mean, there are a lot of things that don't really matter, like we measured pet friendliness, that almost never is important, but in terms of more notable cultural measures that don't impact employee satisfaction, things like agility, innovation and execution are vital for strategy execution, but they almost never have a big impact on employees.

 

David Turetsky 34:58

Interesting, interesting, yeah. Wow!

 

Well, we could talk to you about this all freaking day, actually, because Dwight and I are total geeks when it comes to being able to use the data to drive business outcomes. That's the reason why we have this podcast, and the reason why we actually started it, Charlie, we're gonna have to ask you back again, dude, because there is a lot we haven't uncovered yet about

 

Charlie Sull 35:27

Yeah, I would love that. Thanks for having me. Guys,

 

David Turetsky 35:28

Thank you, Dwight, thank you.

 

Dwight Brown 35:30

Thank you. Thanks for being with us. My head is swirling right now. Good ideas. This is to write it all down. I know exactly.

 

David Turetsky 35:39

Charlie, thanks a lot, and thank you all for listening, take care and stay safe.

 

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