A Tale of Two Cultures - In One Company

• Senior employees have higher sentiment scores than junior employees. The gap in sentiment has been widening since the pandemic.

• The difference between the sentiment of junior and senior employees is driven by differences in career opportunities, compensation and benefits, and culture and values ratings.

• Junior employees are more likely than senior employees to discuss issues related to the management, stress, and salary in their reviews.

Employee morale is an important metric for managers to follow as it has direct implications for motivation, productivity, and employee retention. Yet, employee sentiment can vary widely by different groups of employees even within the same company. This week, Revelio Labs dives into the sentiment data for thousands of US companies to uncover how employee satisfaction varies within companies!

Analysis of employee sentiment from our workforce insights shows that employee satisfaction varies widely between senior and junior employees. Senior employees (manager level and above) seem to rate their companies higher than junior employees. The disparity has grown significantly in the past two years: In 2021, senior employees rated their companies 2.4% higher than their junior counterparts, while the difference increased to 4% by November 2023.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the disparity between senior and junior employees is the highest at companies with a higher share of non-corporate employees, such as USPS, Walmart, and McDonald’s. Meanwhile at tech companies, such as AWS, Intel and Meta, junior employees have more positive sentiment than senior employees.

What explains this widening disparity? The difference in sentiment between junior and senior employees is largest for career opportunities (7.8%) and culture and values (7%) scores. This is consistent with our previous research, in which we show that culture and values and career opportunities are the largest contributors to overall employee satisfaction.

Indeed, Revelio Labs workforce insights show that stress, management, and salary are greater concerns among junior employees than senior employees.

The divergent sentiment between junior and senior employees warrants managerial attention. One way that managers can address sentiment divergence is by fostering an ongoing dialogue among different employees about workplace issues and concerns to bridge the gap between junior and senior employees. We encourage managers to add "talking more to junior employees" to their 2024 New Year's resolution to help achieve a more inclusive environment at the workplace.