At first glance, you might expect COVID-19 to be a disaster for corporate culture. The widespread shift to remote work — half of employees in the U.S. were working from home in April — decreased the face-to-face interactions that reinforce organizational culture.1 The economic downturn in many industries and a spike in layoffs threaten to unravel the social fabric that holds companies together.
Our ongoing analysis of 1.4 million employee-written reviews on Glassdoor, however, tells a very different story. To examine how the pandemic has influenced employees’ perceptions of corporate culture, we looked month by month at how workers at Culture 500 companies rated their employer for the five years through August 2020.