Beyond the Paycheck: How Staples Can Transform Employee Satisfaction Using Sentiment Analysis

Purpose of Analysis

Usually, when you think about how to use sentiment analysis in a business context — your mind goes to the obvious: analyzing customer feedback, identifying product or CX weaknesses, automating customer support, and the list goes on and on.

But another super interesting use-case actually revolves around the employee, rather than the customer. Research has found that happier employees are more than 20% more productive in the workplace. And this is especially important for companies that still rely on in-store employees to deliver high quality customer service.

Staples, for example, is one of these companies. The majority of their revenue is still coming from in-store sales, as opposed to online channels. This means that a lot of emphasis is (or at least should be) placed on hiring excellent employees to maintain high customer satisfaction.

To show you what we mean, let’s use sentiment analysis to find out 1) how happy employees currently are, 2) how to make employees happier, and 3) how to use this information to attract more outstanding employees at Staples.

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The Analysis

To first determine how satisfied Staples employees are to begin with, we ran thousands of their Glassdoor reviews through our sentiment analysis program. We found that while there was overall a higher proportion of positive sentiment compared to negative sentiment, the actual gap was only 10%.

We also had our program identify the most commonly-liked aspects about working at Staples and the most commonly-disliked aspects by looking at categories with the highest volume of positive/negative sentiment. Our goal here was to unlock opportunities for Staples to improve employee satisfaction.

We found that while employees tended to enjoy the general work environment, the flexibility of the role, and the coworkers, lots of folks weren’t happy with the management, pay, and even the workload.

We specifically noticed a repeating pattern of employee complaints about management being negligent, disrespectful, and/or disorganized.

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Meaningfulness of Results

This data gives us more than enough information to answer the questions I posed at the beginning of this study.

1) Currently, how happy are employees?

We can see that while there is a higher proportion of satisfied employees compared to unsatisfied, there’s definitely room for improvement. For example, that 28% of employees who are neutral could easily be swayed in the positive direction by fixing up a few of those employee pain points.

2) How can Staples make employees happier?

Our data shows that Staples’ areas of weakness are clearly management, pay, and workload. There isn’t always a lot you can do about pay, but if Staples can improve their employees’ comprehensive working experiences, these hires may care about the pay a little less.

For example, offering better training to folks in management or being pickier about who to place in managerial positions may actually create a rippling effect that could help resolve other big issues like poor distribution of workload or disrespect in the workplace. After all, respect is a HUGE determinant of employee happiness.

3) How can Staples attract more (and better) employees?

It’s true that people care a LOT about pay when searching for a job, but the atmosphere and benefits offered can easily matter just as much. Our data clearly identifies the top 3 strengths (work environment, flexibility, people) that Staples could hone in on when marketing their job openings in the future.

And once they’ve refined their weaker areas, these changes will eventually reflect in their employee testimonials and help convey to prospective employees that they’ve got the whole package. And if more people are willing to apply, Staples has a better chance of finding more well-qualified, hardworking candidates in the applicant pool.

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