Asian American business woman in workplace
Glassdoor has established itself as the leader in offering insights from current and former employees about workplaces across industries. More than 114 million professionals have offered reviews of their employers. Many have also furnished self-reported compensation data. According to stats on its website, 60% of users report reading at least five reviews before forming an opinion of a company and ultimately deciding whether to apply.
This week, Glassdoor added new features that will give jobseekers more honest intel into the climate and culture of businesses.
In the workplace climate assessments I’ve conducted in a range of organizations over the past two decades, too many professionals have said to my research team members and me that if they knew how sexist, homophobic, and racist a place was, they never would’ve applied. It’s really hard – in some instances impossible – to get connected with enough demographically similar people when one is involved in a fast-moving interview process. It’s even more difficult to get those potential colleagues to feel safe enough telling a stranger the full truth about what it's like to work at a place as a lesbian or a person with a disability, for example.
The new Glassdoor features offer a promising solution to this challenge. They also have the potential to help solve other problems that have long resulted in diverse jobseekers being duped by businesses.
Company Explorer is Glassdoor’s tool that allows people to easily search for workplaces based on location, industry, company size, overall company rating, and other variables. This tool has a new set of filters that allow people to customize their job search by employees’ perspectives on life/work balance, culture and values, diversity and inclusion, and other experiential factors. Additionally, jobseekers can filter employee ratings by race/ethnicity, gender and gender identity, sexual orientation, and (dis)ability.
Being able to filter ratings by diversity and inclusion, as well as by demographic variables, will enable underrepresented professionals to hear from others with whom they share characteristics whether a company is likely to love them back—or if the company maintains policies, practices, and cultures that result in discrimination, disregard, disrespect, inequities, and violence against particular groups of employees.
Many organizations misrepresent inflated multicultural versions of themselves on websites, in recruitment materials, and in product/service advertisements. Stock photos that appear throughout are usually not reflective of the actual demographic composition of the people who work at the place. One easy way to determine the magnitude of this deception is to go to the leadership, staff, and board links on company websites, if they’re available.
Within seconds, it often becomes clear that the diversity represented in the stock photos is inconsistent with who works there – or at least the people who are in charge. It is highly likely that some Glassdoor reviews will help Asian American women, for example, understand not only how many (or how few) of them there actually are, but also roles in which they’re most represented and what it’s like to be the one or one of only a few Asian American women there, if that is indeed the compositional reality.
Companies also do irresponsible and deceptive things with diversity data—lumping all employees of color together in a single stat and failing to disaggregate representation data by race and gender is irresponsible. Seeing on a website that “31% of our team is comprised of racially/ethnically diverse professionals” may be compelling enough to entice someone to apply.
But what that stat fails to disclose is that only 2% of those employees are Black; that there are only five Black men who work there; that those five Black men are often mistaken for each other, despite looking nothing alike; and that four of them are in the least-compensated, lowest-authority roles. These new Glassdoor features will give Black men and others a platform through which to expose statistical deception, and to put experiences alongside representation percentages.
The Glassdoor enhancements will help solve another data problem: the manipulation of employee experience survey results. Some version of “how included do you feel on your team” and “how included do you feel in the company overall” are typically included in company surveys of employees. They tend to be the only DEI-related survey items.
On their own, these questions offer far too few insights into how workers, particularly those who make businesses diverse, uniquely experience the workplace climate. When leaders proudly note that 90% of their teammates say they feel included, they usually neglect to acknowledge how few people of color, queer people, and people with disabilities were in the sample. They also usually fail to report the results separately for those groups.
Glassdoor is now giving those employees the power to speak publicly for themselves and jobseekers an easier way to access those insights.
One final noteworthy benefit of the enhanced tool is that it’s likely to make leaders take more seriously what diverse employees say about the challenges and realities of workplace climates. Privately hidden, aggregated, genderless ratings of employee experiences have long shielded companies from public embarrassment. Being able to filter the results reported by women, men, and genderqueer employees will help company leaders and jobseekers alike more deeply understand who’s being treated differently, paid and promoted inequitably, and systematically disadvantaged because of their genders.
I offer one cautionary note about the tool. Even if there are dozens or hundreds of mostly negative reviews from Latino employees on Glassdoor, it doesn’t mean that every Latino professional who works there is having a bad experience. In my research, I rarely hear from employees that every single one of them experiences the company in the exact same way. Some people have positive experiences and cannot recall a time they encountered homophobia, sexism, or racism at work. Most jobseekers are smart enough to understand this.
Nonetheless, the enhanced version of Company Explorer will give diverse professionals much more culturally-relevant information that can be used to make much more informed choices about whether to apply and ultimately take their talents to a workplace.
