Insider Stories: Analyzing Internal Sustainability Efforts of Major US Companies from Online Reviews

TL;DR

This paper introduces a six-dimension framework for internal sustainability efforts, validated through analysis of over 350,000 employee reviews, revealing a link between ISEs and company stock growth.

Contribution

It develops a novel framework for measuring internal sustainability efforts using deep learning on employee reviews, providing new insights into corporate sustainability practices.

Findings

High ISE scores correlate with high stock growth.

The framework effectively scores companies' internal sustainability efforts.

Analysis covers 104 major US companies from 2008-2020.

Abstract

It is hard to establish whether a company supports internal sustainability efforts (ISEs) like gender equality, diversity, and general staff welfare, not least because of lack of methodologies operationalizing these internal sustainability practices, and of data honestly documenting such efforts. We developed and validated a six-dimension framework reflecting Internal Sustainability Efforts (ISEs), gathered more than 350K employee reviews of 104 major companies across the whole US for the (2008-2020) years, and developed a deep-learning framework scoring these reviews in terms of the six ISEs. Commitment to ISEs manifested itself at micro-level -- companies scoring high in ISEs enjoyed high stock growth. This new conceptualization of ISEs offers both theoretical implications for the literature in corporate sustainability, and practical implications for companies and policymakers. To further explore these implications, researchers need to add potentially missing ISEs, to do so for more companies, and establish the causal relationship between company success and ISEs.