In the summer of 2025, CultureX and The Economist newspaper collaborated closely on several pieces of work. The centerpiece was an interactive measuring the culture of 900 leading companies, based on millions of Glassdoor reviews.

The work, which has reached an audience of millions, marks the first time a major newspaper has rigorously measured corporate culture, in an analogous way to how Fortune measures revenue.

Interactive: https://www.economist.com/interactive/business/2025/06/16/corporate-culture

Accompanying article: https://www.economist.com/business/2025/06/16/how-to-build-the-right-corporate-culture

Accompanying podcast: https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2025/06/16/culture-show-me-the-way

Related article on remote work and culture: https://www.economist.com/business/2025/07/07/does-working-from-home-kill-company-culture

Introductory "by invitation" editorial (Feb '24): https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2024/02/12/two-experts-predict-ai-will-transform-companies-understanding-of-themselves

Featuring:

Loren Shuster, CPO, The LEGO Group; Sharon MacBeath, CHRO, Hermès; Manny Maceda, CEO, Bain & Company; Jim Whitehurst, Former CEO, Red Hat; Katie Burke, CPO when Culture was Strong, Hubspot; Marvin Boakye, CHRO, Cummins

Full article (no paywall): https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-leaders-champion-culture-six-essential-lessons/

Most cultures are average or worse, but a rare few measurably live up to core values, satisfy employees, and create exceptional amounts of financial value. In this series, we speak to senior leaders from these elusive Culture Champions and learn how they did it.

Watch series on Youtube.

Listen to the series on Apple podcasts.

Listen to the series on Spotify podcasts.

In our new article in The Economist,  Donald Sull and Charlie Sull argue that AI will transform leaders' ability to understand and improve corporate culture. Our key points:

1) Culture matters: Nearly 80% of CEOs and CFOs list corporate culture among the top five factors driving financial performance. Organizations with a healthy corporate culture can attract, retain, and engage the best employees. A study by Alex Edmans of the best places to work in the U.S. found that their returns to shareholders outperform peers by 24% over a five year period.

2) Culture is not where it needs to be: In the U.S., the average employer rates a 3.6 out of 5 on Glassdoor. Most people wouldn't relish a meal in a restaurant or a ride with an Uber driver with a similar rating. How excited do you think they are to work in an average culture?

3) Current tools to measure culture are ineffective: Organizations cannot improve culture unless they can measure it. Employee engagement surveys excel at assessing whether an employee is engaged, but fall short in measuring all the dimensions of culture. Faced with dozens of multiple choice questions, employees zone out and provide the same or similar answers to very different questions. Their numerical scores provide little context or guidance on how to improve. And of course they cannot discuss topics that are not included in the survey.

4) Free text is a goldmine of cultural insights: When employees answer open-ended questions they discuss what matters most to them, provide context on their concerns, and often suggest concrete recommendations for improvement. The sheer volume of employee feedback available to leaders is staggering. For a large organization, the free text from internal surveys, online reviews, 360 performance reviews, exit interviews, and other sources can equate to dozens of novel-length "books" brimming with granular insights from what employees have to say in their own words.

5) AI revolutionizes our ability to analyze free text: In the past, companies resorted to crude tools like word clouds or key-word search to analyze employee feedback. Now, large language models can reliably make sense of free text at scale. Our CultureX platform, for example, classifies employee feedback into hundreds of granular elements of culture. Armed with these measures, leaders can assess how well their organization lives its core values, identify toxic sub-cultures, smooth cultural integration in M&A, and identify what drives critical outcomes like employee engagement or innovation.

Full article here.

Our analysis of nurses’ employer reviews reveals the true source of burnout and why nurses are leaving the field. Here’s how health care leaders can improve nurse job satisfaction to fight a looming nursing shortage.

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-solve-nursing-crisis/

To address toxicity in the workplace, research shows there are three critical drivers companies should focus on: leadership, social norms, and work design.

Read full article on MIT Sloan Management Review.

From Brené Brown's Dare to Lead podcast:

"Get ready for one of the most powerful Dare to Lead episodes we’ve recorded, especially in terms of data. I’m talking with Dr. Donald Sull and Charlie Sull about an article I came across in the MIT Sloan Management Review titled “Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation.” As we know, between April and September of 2021, more than 24 million American employees left their jobs, an all-time record. Donald and Charlie researched what’s driving the Great Resignation. It is both revealing and confirming to hear how their research connects with the work that we do with Dare to Lead, and it is exactly what we’re seeing in companies all over at the world. We dig deep into the definition of toxic culture, how it shows up, and what it costs individuals and companies."

Check out the full podcast here.

We analyzed 1.3 million Glassdoor reviews to pinpoint which topics lead to the most negative reviews. Employees grumble about hundreds of topics, but only handful--we call them the "Toxic Five"--are associated with the most negative reviews.

The "Toxic Five" are when your culture is
-Disrespectful
-Noninclusive
-Unethical
-Cutthroat (employees actively undermine one another)
-Abusive

10% of all employees in the Culture 500 sample experienced their corporate culture as toxic.
-That translates to over six thousand employees in the average Fortune 500 company
-Even the healthiest cultures have pockets of toxicity, often linked to specific toxic managers.

In addition to the suffering it they cause for employees, toxic cultures create staggering bottom-line costs for companies
•Toxic corporate culture 10 times more predictive of attrition than compensation during the “Great Resignation” (Sull et al., 2022a)
•20% of employees have left a job because of toxic culture (SHRM, 2019)
•A toxic culture is the strongest predictor of a negative Glassdoor review (Sull et al., 2022b, Sockin, 2021)
•Three-quarters of the most disengaged employees are looking for a job, and their lost productivity costs their employer 18% of their salary each year (Gallup, 2021)
•Employees who view their workplace as unfair are 35% to 55% more likely to suffer from major disease (Goh et al, 2015)
•Unethical culture associated with lower financial returns (Guiso et al., 2015)

Read the full MIT Sloan Management Review article here.

Toxic culture is ten times more predictive of employee turnover than employees' assessment of their compensation.

Other findings from study of 560 companies/38 industries:
-There is wide variation in employee turnover across industries, with apparel retail experiencing nearly 5X the attrition rate of airlines
-The industries with the highest attrition include both white-collar (management consulting, enterprise software) and blue-collar (apparel retail, fast food, retail) sectors
-Attrition varies widely within an industry--SpaceX turnover is more than 3X other aerospace companies
-The most innovative companies have higher attrition than more staid competitors
-Lateral career opportunities, company social events, and predictable schedules are associated with higher employee retention

Check out the full article on MIT Sloan Management Review here.

Knowing what elements of culture matter most to employees can help leaders foster engagement as they transition to a new reality that will include more remote and hybrid work.

In this article, Don and Charlie Sull analyzed 1.4 million Glassdoor reviews to learn which cultural factors were the most powerful drivers of an employee's overall satisfaction with their company.

See which topics matter the most by reading the full article on MIT Sloan Management Review: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/10-things-your-corporate-culture-needs-to-get-right/

Check out this article from Unleash to see how CultureX works with the largest beer manufacturer in world, Anheuser Busch InBev, to solve challenges at the forefront of HR Tech.

AB InBev’s work with CultureX “really allows us to capture the heartbeat of what goes on in an organization”, Global Vice-President of People Continuity Toon van der Beer says.

In terms of using technology to understand employee sentiment, “Don and Charlie have really cracked the code”.

Full article: https://www.unleashgroup.io/2021/05/24/ab-inbev-only-use-hr-tech-that-works-for-employees/

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.

Read the full story on MIT SMR.

CultureX analyzed what over 285,000 Tech Giants employees said about their employers' cultures on Glassdoor. When you compare Amazon to the Tech Giants Average, the story is striking.