Do tech companies have the best culture?

Company culture. It’s all the rage this year.

Culture is so popular that brands have even started replacing the traditional HR manager role with swankier titles like “People & Culture Manager” or “Chief Happiness Officer.”

These new roles also come with more nuanced responsibilities than the HR managers of the past. Source: 140+ New HR Trends & Stats For 2019

But what is company culture?

In simple terms, company culture is comprised of the company mission, core values, attitudes, behaviors, and expectations shared by a group of people working together.

But it’s the combination of all of those things that makes a company truly unique.

It's like the secret sauce that makes your business stand out in the eyes of current (and future) employees.

If you think about it, company culture is about as important as your company brand.

In fact, companies with a strong employer brand saw the cost of hiring decrease by 43%.

But I digress. The real question I aim to answer is, “Does the tech industry have the best company culture?”

Most people assume that working in tech gives you the best pay, perks, and benefits. But do tech companies also have the best culture? And if not, which industry does?

Methodology

Before we get to brass tacks, it’s important to identify what constitutes a tech company. The hype around tech is so real that every company seems to be operating as a tech company these days.

We looked at two sources and gathered over 10,000 data points for this study: Glassdoor Company Reviews and MIT’s Culture 500.

We started off simple, assigning each company a category on both the MIT study and their Glassdoor profile.

For a tech company to be a tech company, it had to check off both boxes. And I think we can safely agree on the fact that both Uber and Facebook are tech companies.

Now, on to the interesting part. To really find out if tech companies have the best company culture, we decided to find answers to these 4 questions:

1. Do tech companies have the best company culture on average?
2. Do tech companies have the best company culture across the board?
3. Do tech brands have the best Culture & Value ratings?
4. Would you recommend a friend join your company?

So let’s get started!

1. Do tech companies have the best company culture on average?

To make easier comparisons across values, we decided to analyze the standard deviation score for each company. This score is based on how their review score compared to the other companies on a particular cultural value.

We quickly found that Tech companies have better company culture per the sentiment analysis data from the Culture 500. They actually received double the standard deviation scores across 9 cultural values.

2. Do tech companies have the best company culture across the board?

How do we determine what makes up company culture? Glassdoor & MIT identified 9 cultural values in the graph below:In the above graph, we look at the average standard deviations for tech and other companies across the 9 cultural values. To summarize the findings, here are 3 takeaways:

1. Tech companies received higher scores across most categories.
2. The tech brands particularly excelled in the Innovation, Agility, and Execution categories.
3. But they fall behind other companies when it comes to Integrity, Diversity, and Customer categories.

Tech companies are already 6/9 in this aspect, but let’s keep digging further.

3. Do tech brands have the best Culture & Values ratings?

Before we make any assumptions, let’s take a look at Glassdoor’s highest reviewed companies to get a feel of the raw ratings of each company.

Fun fact: The top 5 companies based on review scores in this study are all tech companies.

As you can see below, tech companies have higher average scores across Culture & Values:Average Culture & Values scores for tech brands were about 8% larger, which was the largest margin between the two for any review category.

Tech companies seem to be winning this without breaking a sweat. But let’s take one more thing into consideration before we announce a winner.

4. Would you recommend a friend join your company?

This is not a crucial factor, but if you don’t want your friends to work with you at your company, the chances of your company culture being strong are slim.The verdict? Tech companies win yet again.

Where do we go from here?

Now we can definitively answer the question, “Does Tech have the best company culture?” Having looked at over 10K data points and crunching the numbers… the short answer is yes.

From my personal viewpoint, it’s pretty obvious whenever you go on social media or read the news—it’s often your friends or just random people living their dream life working at these tech companies.

I’m talking perks like free food, free beers, ping pong tables, open concept offices, unlimited vacation days. Tech companies definitely have the best offices, the fanciest perks, but also robust company cultures. The tech world is jam-packed with smart, interesting, curious people, who generally work well together and care about creating a culture of collaboration.

Source: Instagram

The only thing we’re missing over at Venngage is a ping pong table. But, I’d give it some time. Sooner or later you’ll find us hosting our own ping pong championship.

Does tech have the best company culture? Well, now you know.

Learn how company culture can impact the success of your company.

Author Bio

Aditya Sheth is a Content Marketer at Venngage. When he's not busy writing informative content or brainstorming growth experiments you can find him reading nonfiction, listening to rap or exploring memes on the interwebs. Tweet him @iamadityashth.