Diversity & Inclusion at 20 Top US Tech Companies

We often associate diversity & inclusion with race and gender equality within the working environment but, there is much more which stems from this category. Employees should feel safe within their place of work and diversity is becoming a popular topic of discussion as we see large corporations doing their bit to make employees feel included.

We selected March 2021 as our time frame and took a deep look into diversity & inclusion. D&I has its place in our 16 EBI attributes and we felt it necessary to research the top 20 tech companies in the US and explore how they fare against one another in this attribute.

How we did it

We source data from multiple platforms including; review sites, blogs, and social media sites. For this research, we focused on selected public review platforms and hand-picked data from the top 20 US tech companies before using sentiment analysis to gain a greater insight into how employees felt towards their employer.

As a result, we were able to compile over 25,000 data points all of which were written in March 2021. We focused primarily on reviews written in English and used our unique methodology to score each company from 0 to 10, 0 being the worst and 10 being the best.

The scores you see throughout this study reflect how each company performed in diversity & inclusion and not their total score of all 16 attributes. As we have used a handful of platforms to extract data from, these scores are not definitive nor portray a completely accurate representation of the companies included. However, you will find common themes experienced by talent across the 20 companies in the US tech industry and the impact this may have on their reputation.

This is how they rank:

Sentiment analysis

At Link Humans we find key themes to help identify what is being spoken of the most within a particular attribute. Each theme is found within the comments written by employees, irrespective of their seniority or job title. The analysis of comments allows us to extract the experiences of employees and correlate that with how the company has performed. Where these themes become most useful is when we want to compare and contrast companies within the same or different industries. As this report’s focus is on the tech industry, we’ll be able to identify which companies scored highest and lowest, and relate that to common themes.

Below are the most common themes:

The importance of feeling cared for

A common theme used by employees across all companies was how they are cared for. The vast majority of comments speaking about employee care came from Zoom where both colleagues and managers were described as caring. Employees would include comments such as, “I am cared about as an individual” and “executives really care about how every employee feels.” The heavy number of positive comments from Zoom put them at the top of the list as one of the best employers when it comes to diversity & inclusion within the tech industry.

Support breeds a positive culture

Under diversity & inclusion, we also include comments using the keyword “support”. Through our analysis we found it is a key theme and talent would speak of not only support received from management but also support that can be found from different departments. Comments seen within most companies included “…the management provides the support…” and “very supportive and willing to help.” It’s no surprise to see employees speaking of this theme and also relate it to the culture or atmosphere of the workplace. Comments from IBM and Microsoft focused more on receiving support from their peers and Microsoft described the environment as supportive.

Politics is still rampant

Workplace politics exist within many companies at almost all levels. There is a correlation between politics and decision-making, which could hinder the further development of a company. Talent from most of the 20 tech companies displayed this interconnection through conducting our analysis. This could have major impacts on their development opportunities and put them at a disadvantage against their competitors. Comments such as, “corporate politics” and “internal politics” often appeared with further comments identifying the politics occurring within management. Throughout the analysis we realized that politics is not only a theme where employees experienced it personally, rather they were describing what they observed during their tenure. This issue can cause distance between teams and management, creating a less diverse and inclusive workplace.

The problems with favoritism

As mentioned earlier in this research, diversity & inclusion pertains to equal treatment for all. The opposite of this is favoritism, a common negative theme found during this research. It is most commonly associated with management and treatment from managers, for example, “managers have favoritism” or “…gives benefits to his favorite people.” Most comments came from Amazon and T-Mobile which in turn has a direct impact on their overall score. It goes without saying to score higher, employers would need to take into consideration how employees are treated and ensure they are treated equally.

Competitive analysis

We looked at all 20 companies and picked 4 to compare and contrast. To be consistent, we picked companies that have a similar number of comments but their scores differ. This would help identify where one company is lacking against the other and what improvements could be made to better their score.

Zoom scored highest with an almost perfect score. The majority of the comments were about employee care with mentions of the company’s inclusive nature. The lack of comments regarding diversity or everything which stems from diversity does not necessarily mean it does not exist. In the case of Zoom, the high number of positive comments indicates employees are witnessing as well as experiencing diversity & inclusion.

In comparison to Zoom, Intel had a similar number of mentions however did not score as high. The majority of the negative commentary was about internal politics and not much respect received by staff. Intel is one of the bottom 10 scoring tech companies, however not scoring too far from being in the top 10. Small changes can have a big impact on a company’s score and how employees speak about its diversity and inclusion.

When comparing Apple with Oracle which has a similar number of comments, Apple comes out on top. Employees at Apple make mention of how caring the company is as well as the support and diverse culture Apple creates. These reviews can have a positive impact on talent researching what it’s like to work for Apple. This may even lead to Apple attracting talent from their competitors as employees are sharing some of the great reasons why being an Apple employee is beneficial.

Oracle however did not score as well as Apple. Through conducting our analysis we found that employees felt they were undervalued and there was a lack of support. Given these are the key themes within diversity & inclusion at Oracle, it paints a clear picture of how employees feel towards Oracle as an employer. Although other areas of the business may be performing better, the score indicates there is work to be done within the diversity & inclusion department.

Conclusion

We aimed to compile the top 20 tech companies in the US and take a deeper look into their employer branding, in particular diversity & inclusion. We focused on March 2021 and used sentiment analysis to find which employer would score best. Zoom came out on top, scoring 9.46 with Microsoft and Micron Technology coming 2nd and 3rd respectively. Through this research, we were able to find common themes used by employees to describe how diverse & inclusive the company they work for is. Keywords such as care, support, and politics were used frequently, allowing us to narrow which areas within the diversity & inclusion companies are doing well and not so well.

Problems are not fixed overnight. They take planning, time, and deep, methodical analysis to target exactly where the problem is and how to overcome it. This case study has shown where companies are doing well but also where companies are lacking. A step in the right direction would be to implement changes and as time goes on, scores begin to increase and employees feel they work for a more diverse and inclusive company.

Interested in how your organization scores in D&I and the other 15 employer brand attributes that make up the Link Humans Index? Get in touch to learn more!