Daniele Quercia

Daniele Quercia is Professor of Urban Informatics at the Center of Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), King’s College London, and Department Head at Nokia Bell Labs in Cambridge (UK)

Insider Stories: Analyzing Stress, Depression, and Staff Welfare at Major US Companies from Online Reviews

Abstract. We mined 440K company reviews published during twelve successive years on GlassDoor, and developed state-of-the-art deep-learning frameworks to accurately extract mentions of:

  1. Stress [1,2]. There are two types of stress: distress refers to harmful stimuli, while eustress refers to healthy, euphoric stimuli that create a sense of fulfillment and achievement. Telling the two types of stress apart is challenging, let alone quantifying their impact across corporations. We scored each company to be either a low stress, passive, negative stress, or positive stress company. We found that (former) employees of positive stress companies tended to describe high-growth and collaborative workplaces in their reviews, and that such companies’ stock evaluations grew, on average, 5.1 times in 10 years (2009-2019) as opposed to the companies of the other three stress types that grew, on average, 3.7 times in the same time period. We also found that the four stress scores aggregated every year – from 2008 to 2020 – closely followed the unemployment rate in the U.S.: a year of positive stress (2008) was rapidly followed by several years of negative stress (2009-2015), which peaked during the Great Recession (2009-2011).
  2. Internal Sustainability Efforts (ISEs) [3], which reflect whether a company supports gender equality, diversity, and general staff welfare. Commitment to ISEs manifested itself not only at micro-level (companies scoring high in ISEs enjoyed high stock growth) but also at macro-level (states hosting these companies were economically wealthy and equal, and attracted the so-called creative class).
  • [1] Pressure Test: Good Stress for Company Success https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.12362
  • [2] Depression at Work: Exploring Depression in Major US Companies from Online Reviews
  • [3] Insider Stories: Analyzing Internal Sustainability Efforts of Major US Companies from Online Reviews https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.01217

Bio. Daniele Quercia is interested in the relationship between online and offline worlds and his work has been focusing in the areas of urban informatics. He was General Chair for AAAI ICWSM and Track Chair for ACM WWW. He has been co-editor of Computer Communications Journal Special Issue on Online Social Networks (Elsevier) 2014 and for the Special issue on Personality in Personalized systems (UMUAI) 2014. His research has been published in leading venues including ICSE, Ubicomp, ICDM, CSCW, RecSys, WSDM, and WWW, received a best paper award from ACM Ubicomp and from AAAI ICWSM, and an honorable mention from AAAI ICWSM, and has been featured on more than 90 international news outlets. He spoke at TED, wrote for BBC, and has been named one of Fortune magazine’s 2014 Data All-Stars. He was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he worked on social networks in a city context, then a Horizon senior researcher at The Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge and, after that, a Research Scientist at Yahoo Labs in Barcelona. He received his PhD from UC London.