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Decoding employee experiences Decoding

employee
during pandemic through online experiences

employee reviews: insights

to organizations
Arun Joshi Received 13 July 2022
Revised 30 September 2022
Vinod Gupta School of Management, IIT Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India and 13 December 2022
International School of Business and Media, Pune, India, and Accepted 5 January 2023

Srinivasan Sekar and Saini Das

Vinod Gupta School of Management, IIT Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India

Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to unearth various dimensions of employee experience (EX) and
explore how pandemic impacted various EX factors using online employee reviews. The authors identify
employee-discussed EX-factors and quantify the associated sentiments and importance.
Design/methodology/approach – This paper employs Latent Dirichlet Allocation on the online employee
reviews to identify the key EX-factors. The authors probe sentiments and importance associated with key EX-
factors using sentiment analysis, importance analysis, regression analysis and dominance analysis.
Findings – The result of topic modeling identifies 20 EX-factors that shape overall EX. While skill
development plays a major role in shaping overall EX, employees perceived Salary and Growth as the most
important EX-factor and expressed negative sentiments during the pandemic. Employee sentiments
significantly influence overall EX.
Practical implications – When employees have extensive change experience, managers should consider
various facets of EX to manage the smooth change and deliver a better EX. This research offers key EX-factors
to be considered by managers while dealing with employees. Online employee reviews websites are
recommended to include the identified key EX-factors to comprehend the holistic EX.
Originality/value – This study contributes to the growing literature on the employee experience as a concept
by identifying various EX-factors. The authors expand the extant EX scales by identifying an inclusive and
updated set of EX-factors.
Keywords Employee experience, COVID-19 pandemic, Online employee reviews, Sentiment analysis, Latent
Dirichlet Allocation, Dominance analysis
Paper type Research paper

1. Introduction
In the past few decades, the advent of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)
has shifted the way of expression to a new paradigm. With the technological transformation,
more and more people are engaging in information sharing through various online platforms
(Park et al., 2014). Employees working in various market sectors are no exception to it. They
express their views, reviews and opinions, giving ratings on numerous aspects of their job
through online employment review websites. These online employee reviews (OER) openly
signify the true picture of employee experience (EX) in the organization. Among these online
platforms, some have prescribed fields where employees can share their opinions by
assigning the rating on a designated scale (5-point or 7-point). Others have textual reviews or
a combination of both. Such mixed reviews provide the opportunity to get meaningful

Personnel Review
Declaration of interest statement: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial © Emerald Publishing Limited
0048-3486
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. DOI 10.1108/PR-07-2022-0478
PR information about the employees’ experience and their perception of their organizations.
Thus, OER encompasses holistic employee experience in different situations.
Employees working in different organizations are increasingly using Internet sites (such
as Glassdoor, Ambition, etc.) to share their experiences in the public domain, which are
referred to by potential employees to make employment decisions such as employer selection
and job preferences (Bridger and Gannaway, 2021). Concurrently, a growing number of
business organizations are embracing OER to understand employee experiences as part of
their business strategy to attract customers, employees and investors. Contemporary
research validates the positive relationship between firms’ ratings and employee satisfaction,
that in turn leads to superior profitability (Symitsi et al., 2021). In other words, OER, as a
source of employee experiences, is proven to be of high significance when forecasting the
financial performance of business firms and corporate reputation.
Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, the business argument for EX was mostly centered on
the competition for talent, with research suggesting that people were actively seeking
other employment opportunities (Bridger and Gannaway, 2021). But the pandemic has
forced a sudden shift in the standard operating procedures (SOPs) of business
organizations and created new challenges for firms. The COVID-19 situation provided a
chance to do things differently and “reset” the EX-strategy within companies with respect
to recruitment, selection, onboarding of new joiners and mode of work (Bridger and
Gannaway, 2021). The World Health Organization (WHO) declared coronavirus (COVID-
19) a pandemic on March 11, 2020, which translated into a global disease outbreak putting
the whole world at risk. Many nations have shown leadership by enacting emergency steps
to control the spread of the virus, which resulted in severe economic and social upheavals
throughout the globe (Macintyre, 2020). Consequently, the COVID-19 outbreak impacted
human beings at organizational, institutional and individual levels (Hamouche, 2020).
Business organizations adapted to these situations by bringing several changes in
accordance with the business continuity requirements. During this time, employee
experiences and employee perception of their organization are among the most critical
facets managers should understand while dealing with an array of reactions from
employees. Extant literature has documented how the COVID-19 crisis has impacted
employees’ opinions about their employers (Mihailovi
c et al., 2021), which has a long-term
impact on the performance and success of an organization (Stensaker and Meyer, 2011).
Research conducted during the pandemic to examine employee experiences and employee
expectations reveal that employees who have experienced work-from-home expect their
organizations to offer similar flexible work schedules in the future (Eftimov, 2022).
Organizations are expected to embrace the positive changes induced by the pandemic as a
part of organizational evolution and modify business policies and HR practices
accordingly. In addition, recent industry reports signify the importance of EX in
employee retention (Bridger and Gannaway, 2021). Thus, to access employee opinions and
reactions and understand EX, OER is one of the significant sources of information that can
facilitate an organization to measure metrics like employee satisfaction (ESAT) and
employee net promoter score (eNPS) (Sainju et al., 2021).
Online reviews have become a crucial data source in various areas of business, such as
marketing, tourism, finance and human resource management (Silveira, 2019; Symitsi et al.,
2018, 2021). In OER, ratings on different predefined job attributes (such as Skill Development,
Job Security, Company Culture, etc.) give an idea of how an organization is dealing with its
employees in the context of some specific aspects of the job. However, rating data alone do not
provide a holistic perspective and cannot comprehensively describe the holistic employee
experiences covering various dimensions (Chatterjee, 2019). As an integral part of OER,
textual reviews are far more informative, whereby an organization can not only understand
the overall sentiments and emotions of its employees but also get an idea about various
dimensions of EX and how they contribute to creating overall EX (Ye et al., 2009). In addition, Decoding
subjectivity and review length in OER would add value to comprehending employee employee
experiences (Zhao et al., 2019). Extant literature has discussed how OER influences
employment perception and employee decision-making, signifying that OER are critical for
experiences
business organizations (Symitsi et al., 2021). However, not many studies have addressed the
use of OER to develop an understanding of employees’ experiences while encountering
difficult times such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
Recognizing the importance of examining the OER in order to establish a practical and
comprehensive understanding of EX during the pandemic and addressing the above research
gaps, we examined both the textual reviews and rating data. We identified the key EX-factors
expressed in textual reviews using topic modeling and also performed analyses on scrapped
OER. In this research, we aim to answer the following research questions:
RQ1. What are the key EX-factors that determine the overall employee experience?
RQ2. What are the sentiments and importance associated with each identified EX-factor?
RQ3. What is the relative importance of various predefined star-rated job attributes
influencing the overall rating of an organization?
RQ4. Do the sentiments (composite, positive and negative) expressed in the textual
reviews and text attributes (subjectivity and review length) influence the overall
rating?
To answer these research questions, we collect and examine online employee reviews during
COVID-19 of the top 50 Indian business organizations according to the Economic Times (ET)
ranking [1], which is based on the total income (or revenue) in the last fiscal year (FY2020-
2021). The rationale behind selection of the top 50 business firms is twofold: first, the top
business firms have stable business policies and better employee practices. These
organizations cover a major part of the national gross domestic product (GDP), receive
more attention from the public and government and proactively respond to the changes
caused by internal/external business environments (Statistia, 2022). Therefore, it is likely that
these organizations would have altered their policies and practices to manage the growing
concerns and needs during the onset of COVID-19. Secondly, most of these firms are part of
the top 100 great places to work (ET, 2022). Thus, many people aspire to be part of these
organizations as an employee. These potential employees seek information about the
experience of their present employees pertaining to various job aspects, nature of business
policies and market repute. Therefore, we chose to study the employee reviews of these firms.
We perform a set of analyses on textual reviews and rating data (see Table 1) to generate
meaningful insights from OER. For this paper, we refer to predefined job attribute ratings
available in OERs as aspect-based ratings and employee experience factors extracted from
textual evaluations as EX-factors.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 reviews the related literature and
discusses the research framework. Section 3 describes the details of research methods.
Section 4 consists of this study’s results, followed by the discussion of findings in terms of
theoretical contributions, managerial implications and future scope. Finally, section 6
concludes the paper.

2. Literature review
2.1 Employee experience and COVID-19 pandemic
The evidence of employee experiences research can be traced back to 1998 when researchers
observed that positive experiences are essential to developing positive attitudes
PR Research questions Methods Relevant literature

RQ 1. What are the key EX-factors that Latent Dirichlet Allocation Anupriya and
determine the overall employee experience? (LDA) Karpagavalli, 2015, Guo
et al., 2017b
RQ 2. What are the sentiments and importance Sentiment and importance Chatterjee, 2019, Jung and
associated with each identified EX-factor? analyses Suh, 2019
RQ 3. What is the relative importance of various Multiple regression and Budescu, 1994, Tonidandel
predefined star-rated job attributes influencing dominance analyses and LeBreton, 2011
the overall rating of an organization?
RQ 4. Do the sentiments (composite, positive Multiple regression analysis Jung and Suh, 2019, Sainju
Table 1. and negative) expressed in the textual reviews et al., 2021
Methods used to and text attributes (subjectivity and review
conduct this research length) influence the overall rating?

(Rucci et al., 1998). In a research conducted by MIT to examine how employee experiences
influence corporate value creation, they found the EX and customer satisfaction as key
differentiating factors that helped business firms outperform their competitors (Dery and
Sebastian, 2017). Employee experience was postulated based on customer experience
management, which originates at the heart of a business (Itam and Ghosh, 2020). Following
the focus shift in the thoughts of marketing concepts from “satisfaction” to “experience”,
organizations aimed to restructure the HR policies, strategies and activities to improve the
overall employee experience (Itam and Ghosh, 2020). The use of “experience” as a delivery
model was initially operationalized in the service sector, which resulted in promising financial
results. Consequently, several other industries followed it, which ultimately created an
“experience economy” (Schmitt, 2010). EX can be defined as – “the set of perceptions,
emotions and feelings experienced by an employee through their involvement in work and
within the organizational climate, which provides them with positive reinforcement to
develop, engage, contribute and retain within the organization for good” (Itam and Ghosh,
2020). Previous industry research reports are of the view that EX significantly influences
business growth, employee engagement, productivity, profitability and facilitates creating
competitive advantage (Nelson and Doman, 2017). Employee experience is driven by a
number of individual and organizational variables and interactions among them. Previous
studies have attempted to explore various dimensions of EX and measure it as a higher-order
construct (Yadav and Vihari, 2021). However, researchers disagree on whether or not the
results of these studies are conclusive (Gheidar and ShamiZanjani, 2020; Shambi, 2021). The
current study attempts to fill this research gap by identifying the key dimensions of employee
experience through OER that provide a detailed account of first-hand employee experience.
The pandemic has significantly impacted how businesses interact with employees
through business policies and employee practices (Eftimov, 2022). As the COVID-19
pandemic caused a global economic slowdown, this resulted in various undesirable actions
by business organizations, such as changes in the number of work hours, salary deductions
and termination. Employees across the organizations were compelled to work from home (or
remote work) because of the lockdown restrictions (Oakman et al., 2022; Tan and Antonio,
2022). Such unanticipated and sudden changes affected employees in different ways and
impacted various spheres of life. The pandemic-induced transformations caused many
changes in the standard business operations, which impacted various aspects of employee
experiences. For instance, the role of physical office space to EX was of little importance,
digital spaces became the new offices and work-from-home gained the extraordinary
attention of corporate strategists and academicians (Bridger and Gannaway, 2021).
Consequently, employees encountered several unforeseen situations in their personal,
professional and social lives. In their recent research to explore what factors influence Decoding
employee performance during the crisis, Tan and Antonio (2022) have observed perceived e- employee
leadership, teleworking output, a sense of purpose and organizational commitment as
primary antecedents of employee adaptive performance and employee experiences during
experiences
the pandemic. Extant literature and recent industry reports are of the view that though the
majority of businesses and people disliked the developments caused by the pandemic, some
express favorable opinions (PwC, 2021; Tusl et al., 2021). Eftimov (2022), in a contemporary
review paper summarizing sixteen studies that examine how the pandemic has impacted
employee-employer interaction, concluded that employee experience is one of the critical
factors that will shape work in the near future and beyond. Recent global surveys conducted
to examine the employee experience showed that the pandemic had a negative and significant
impact on financial performance, productivity, organizational culture, employee engagement
and employee well-being (WTW, 2021). In contrast, some employees reported improvements
in their personal and professional lives because of flexible work hours (work-from-home),
increased leisure time and caring duties (Tusl et al., 2021); the majority of employees have
shown their interest in switching to the hybrid work-model (PwC, 2021). Thus, it is observed
that employees have experienced and exhibited both positive and negative workplace
outcomes. Inferring these employee perceptions with the affective event theory, pandemic
has inflicted employees to experience and react in different ways. External events, according
to affective event theory (AET), produce a range of emotions in employees, which impact job
satisfaction and performance (Oakman et al., 2022; Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996). These
employee outcome variables play a determining role in shaping employee experience and
opinion of employees (Morrison, 2011). In line with the AET, these developments due to the
pandemic stirred a variety of sentiments amongst employees that influenced their opinion
about their organization (Farooq and Sultana, 2022). Extant literature is of the view that
individual sentiments exhibit significant influence on online review and rating behavior
(Chatterjee, 2019) and nine out of ten employers are proactively working on enhancing
employee experiences in the post-covid era (WTW, 2021). Therefore, OER has the power to
convey an accurate picture of employees’ experiences and opinions regarding their
employers.

2.2 Online employee reviews

Online employee reviews (OER) are one of the best possible integrations of quantitative and
qualitative instruments to comprehend the employee experience (Symitsi et al., 2021). OER
consists of both subjective and objective information (Zhao et al., 2019). The factual
information about an organization and job profile is described as “objective”; additional
information, such as expressing emotion in online reviews, is considered “subjective”. The
volume and nature of OER impact the choice of organizations, employees’ word of mouth and
attitude (K€onsgen et al., 2018). The financial implications of OER have been well documented
and known to increase job satisfaction which implies increased organizational performance
(Symitsi et al., 2018). Drivers of OER under various contexts have remained a key research
area for the last few years (Symitsi et al., 2021). Researchers have used a variety of latent
constructs, such as employee well-being (Silarova et al., 2022), job satisfaction (Van Vu et al.,
2022), etc., to explain employee experience. In most cases, these studies have used survey-
based methods for data collection using the Likert scale. Thereby, it is imperative to explore
EX-factors and understand employee experience using employee-generated information,
eliminating self-selection bias and other biases concerned with data collection from sample
surveys. The present study undertakes both qualitative (text written in Likes, Dislikes and
Work sections of OER) and quantitative (pre-defined ratings on a five-point Likert scale on
seven parameters and overall rating in OER) data to explore the key EX factors and assess
PR the relative significance of various aspects of EX. This study is crucial as it bridges the gap in
extant literature and practice by examining employee experiences during the COVID-19
pandemic and creating insights from employee-generated data.

2.3 Topic modelling

Given the rise of social media platforms that create a large amount of textual and numerical
data, traditional data analysis approaches are being supplemented with new text analysis
techniques (such as keyword analysis, emotion analysis, sentiment analysis, etc.) to obtain
meaningful insights using advanced analytical techniques (Chatterjee, 2019; Jung and Suh,
2019). One such text analysis tool is topic modeling, which looks for hidden patterns in texts
(Arun et al., 2010). Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), one of the extensively used and validated
topic modeling techniques, is based on the assumption that every document contains
probabilistically distributed topics with their respective probabilistically distributed words
(Guo et al., 2017). One area of contention in LDA is how many topics to use from a corpus (Zhao
et al., 2015). Hasan et al. (2021), in their research to examine the methods to find the optimal
number of topics in LDA, established that a combination of perplexity score and coherence
score works better than existing methods to determine the optimal number of topics. After
reaching the optimal number of topics, the topics’ relevance and meaningfulness must be
assured. In previous studies, secondary data, such as existing literature or published news
items, have been used to evaluate the topic quality (Jung and Suh, 2019).
A number of prior studies have employed LDA to explore the key dimensions of online
generated data in different contexts, such as job satisfaction of employees (Jung and Suh, 2019),
customer satisfaction and recommendation behavior (Qiao et al., 2017), to mention a few. In
addition to LDA, there are studies that applied qualitative techniques to identify determinants
of employee experience. For instance, Prajapati and Pandey (2020) in their qualitative research
(thematic analysis) to understand the employee experience during the pandemic in the
investment banks, have identified five major themes (i.e. Virtual Recruitment, Work from home,
Employee Well-being, Employee Communication and Diversity and Inclusion). Similarly, Neill
and Bowen (2020) and Qin and Men (2022) have highlighted the importance of organizational
listening in the process of influencing the experience of employees during the pandemic.
Hancock and Schaninger (2020) have emphasized on a tailor-made approach depending on the
nature of work (i.e. remote/hybrid/etc.) by the organization to enhance employee experience and
engagement during pandemic. In addition, a number of scholars have sought to
re-conceptualize and conceive the EX based on prior literary evidence and theories with the
commencement of the pandemic (Shambi, 2021; Zacher and Rudolph, 2022). However, the
majority of these studies concentrates on certain facets of the employee experience and are thus
limited in scope. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the key
EX-factors impacting the employees during the pandemic and employee sentiments and
importance related to those EX-factors through OER, making it unique.

3. Research framework and methodology

This section explains our study framework (see Figure 1 and Figure 3) and the methods (see
Table 1). The proposed approach includes pre-processing of online reviews, including POS
tagging, topic modeling and a number of analyses (such as sentiment analysis, importance
analysis, etc.) based on employees’ resulting topics and ratings.

3.1 Data collection

We developed a Python crawler for web scraping and acquired the OER dataset from
ambitionbox.com, one of the most prominent online employer review sites in India. This
 Decoding
employee
experiences

Figure 1.
Study framework

website classifies the reviews based on the content of textual inputs (such as job security,
senior management, career growth, appraisal, work culture, work-life balance, COVID-19,
salary, etc.). Employees have the option to mention their name and position or keep their
reviews anonymous. Here, it is worth noting that among the leading OER websites such as
glassdoor.com, vault.com, indeed.com, ambitionbox.com, etc., only ambitionbox.com had a
separate section for employee reviews under the heading named “COVID Related Reviews”
based on the content of OER (Figure 2). Therefore, we selected this website for the purpose of
present study. We focused on the reviews under the category of “COVID Related Reviews”
and received a total of 5,238 reviews (please see Table A1 in Appendix). The step-by-step
process of selection of companies is depicted in Figure 3.

3.2 Text pre-processing module (TPPM) for parts of speech (POS) tagging
The “curse of dimensionality” prevents many terms in OER from being useful in text
analysis. To obtain meaningful analytical findings, it is necessary to remove such extraneous
terms. This study only considers nouns, adjectives and verbs as they are the most
quintessential token in a document (Chatterjee, 2019; Jung and Suh, 2019). As a part of text
pre-processing, lemmatization was performed to incorporate the root words of modified parts
of speech (such as adverbs) in the final corpus of words. Nevertheless, it is challenging to
extract these parts from the corpus due to the “out of dictionary problem” [2]. We
implemented the text pre-processing module (TPPM) to address these issues. As this study
PR

Figure 2.
An example of an
online employee review
from Ambitionbox.com

uses secondary data posted on employee websites in the form of employee reviews, the
acquired dataset needs attention prior to analysis since reviews often contain contents that do
not offer information that includes stop words, language errors, etc. To address issues in the
secondary data, we corrected spacing errors, spelling errors, removed stop words and
lemmatized the words in the final corpus. After this, we performed collocation analysis to
identify bigrams and trigrams in the corpus to obtain better and more accurate results (Jung
and Suh, 2019). Text pre-processing makes the word-corpus manageable, enhances the
performance of an NLP application and improves the reliability and accuracy of results
obtained from semantic analysis techniques such as sentiment analysis, document
categorization, etc. The blueprint of TPPM (along with an example) is presented in Figure 4.

3.3 Topic modeling

We utilize LDA to explore underlying patterns in employee reviews. Notably, topics obtained
from LDA refer to EX-factors. Each review contains “Likes”, “Dislikes” and “Work” sections
and is vectorized as follows (Anupriya and Karpagavalli, 2015; Jung and Suh, 2019):


Ri ¼ L1;i ; L2;i ; . . . ; LjFj;i ; D; D2;i ; . . . ; DjFj;i ; W1;i ; W2;i ; . . . ; WjFj;i ði ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; nÞ; (1)

where Lk;i ðDk;i ; Wk;i Þ is the count of words associated with kth EX-factor in “Likes”
(“Dislikes”, “Work”) section of an ith review Ri and jFj denotes the total number of EX-factors
Next, we employ the perplexity and coherence scores to reduce the human effort in
deriving the optimal number of topics (Hasan et al., 2021). Further, through a little human
intervention, we combined the overlapping topics. After that, we followed prescribed
guidelines for ensuring the reliability and validity of obtained EX-factors (Anupriya and
Karpagavalli, 2015; Jung and Suh, 2019).

3.4 Qualitative and quantitative analyses

3.4.1 Sentiment and importance analysis. To calculate the sentiment and importance of
individual EX-factor in our study, we employed the following equations (Jung and Suh, 2019).
We assess the sentiment of an EX-factor (fk Þ in reviews by assuming that a reviewer is happy
 Decoding
employee
experiences

Figure 3.
The selection process
of companies

(unhappy) about a specific EX-factor if the words linked with the factor exist in the “Likes”
(“Dislikes”) section. Similarly, we estimate the importance assuming that the frequency of
words associated with a specific topic in the review (or corpus) is directly linked with the
importance of that factor.
Pn P n
ðLk;i  Dk;i Þ ðLk;i þ Dk;i þ Wk;i Þ
Sentim ent ðfk Þ ¼ i¼1 ; Importance ðf Þ ¼ i¼1
Pn k
PjFj P n
ðLk;i þ Dk;i Þ j¼1 ðLk;i þ Dk;i þ Wk;i Þ
i¼1 i¼1

where n, Lk;i ; and Dk;i carry the same meaning as those in Equation (1). To understand the
value calculated by this formula, the value of sentiment ðfk Þ is closer to 1 implies the positive
sentiment, whereas closer value to 1 implies negative sentiment.
PR

Figure 4.
Text pre-processing
module

3.4.2 Dominance and regression analysis. Though regression analysis explains the relative
importance of exogenous variables (Guo et al., 2017), researchers suggested refraining from
using it to determine relative importance for instances when exogenous variables are
correlated (Jung and Suh, 2019). In such a case, we utilize dominance analysis and regression
analysis to examine which job attributes are most influential on the overall rating. The
dominance analysis measures the relative importance of individual variables by considering
the average change in R2 when the variable is included in each possible regression model
without it (Budescu, 1994). We use each of the seven aspect-based ratings as exogenous
variables and the overall rating as the variable for conducting these analyses.
Extant literature suggests that, in addition to numerous job attributes, individual
sentiments (both positive and negative) and text attributes (subjectivity and review length)
substantially impact overall rating. Subjectivity refers to the sentiment subjectivity of the
review. A higher subjectivity score indicates a more subjective review. Therefore, we use
multiple regression to investigate the impact of these factors on the overall rating.

4. Experiments and results

4.1 Text pre-processing module
The vectorized form of reviews serves as the foundation of experiments and analyses in this
study. We employed TPPM on textual reviews for POS tagging, which resulted in a list of
hundreds of compound nouns and neologisms in descending Point–wise Mutual Information Decoding
order. Three researchers in a similar domain assessed the generated list to select the words to employee
create a domain dictionary. We only utilized words chosen unanimously by the three
researchers. A total of 118 neologisms and compound nouns were included in the domain
experiences
dictionary during the first iteration. In the second iteration, 23 additional terms were added to
the dictionary. In these iterations, relevant bigrams, trigrams and neologisms (such as work-
life balance, work from home, cab facility, etc.) were added to the domain dictionary. After the
second iteration, no additional words (neologisms or compound nouns) were found in the
further iterations. As a result, a total of 141 words were added to the domain dictionary.
Excerpts from the domain dictionary’s list of neologisms and compound nouns are
demonstrated in Table 2. Using the system and domain dictionaries, TPPM tags each word in
the corpus with its POS.

4.2 Topic modeling

In order to identify topics in the textual data, we extracted nouns, adjectives and verbs in the
corpus. Afterward, we excluded stopwords and reviews containing no nouns/adjectives/
verbs. Consequently, 5,169 reviews remained for topic modeling. We calculated the perplexity
and coherence scores to determine the optimal number of topics before building the topic
model from the reviews. The coherence score indicates the degree of semantic proximity
among the words of topic identified by LDA, while the perplexity score quantifies the
complexity in predicting topics from the probabilistically distributed corpus of words. When
the number of topics reached 31, the perplexity score decreased to 10.67 (minimum) and the
coherence score increased to 0.44 (maximum). Therefore, we set and obtained 31 topics from
the corpus using LDA.
Expectedly, several meaningfully overlapping topics were found because of the relatively
big number of extracted topics with relatively low interpretability. Therefore, to integrate the
overlapping topics and improve their interpretability, we grouped the homogenous topics

Number of
iterations Neologism Compound nouns

1 work from home; offitics; covid-19;
lockdown; pandemic situation; covid
situation; containment zone; person by
person; not paying salary; worst
organization to work; best company; work-
life balance; help family; cab facility, etc
2 variable pay, cost-cutting, containment
zone, late-night, per employee, etc
job security; career growth; work
environment; Company policies; salary hike;
work life; career growth; training session;
work culture; salary hike; formal training;
decent career; supportive management; good
work; social distance; personal life; bond year;
skill development; bad experience; team
member; salary increment; work hours; work
environment; internal politics; salary package;
family member; notice period; work load; top
management; full salary; good experience;
shift allowances, etc
other benefits; ground level; hr team; hr policy;
health status; salary structure; employee-
friendly; annual appraisal; life insurance;
onsite opportunity; medical facility;
communication skill; Internet connection; Table 2.
mental health; terrible experience; decent Excerpts from the list
career growth; good work environment; of words added in the
financial support, etc domain dictionary
PR containing keywords with similar weights. Each topic was evaluated and tagged in terms of
EX-factors by the three researchers that developed the domain dictionary. Subsequently, we
obtained 20 EX-factors from OERs (Please see Table 3).
Next, we used the inter-rater agreement technique to evaluate the reliability of these
EX-factors and judge their trustworthiness. We invited two independent research fellows
(hereinafter “scholar A” and “scholar B”) to extract the EX-factors from the 300 randomly
sampled reviews. These scholars were not provided with any information pertaining to the
list of topics generated using LDA. In addition, scholar A was not aware of the topics labeled
by scholar B and vice versa. Consequently, scholar A identified 19 factors and scholar B
identified 17 factors. 17 topics were common to scholar A and LDA and 14 topics to scholar B.
Only scholar A found Recreational Activities and Marketing and only scholar B identified
Colleagues, Infrastructure and Corporate Image as EX-factors from sampled reviews. To
proceed further, we arrived at the eight most common factors tagged a minimum of 25 times
by LDA, scholar A and scholar B. The comparative chart is presented in Figure 5.
Since LDA is an unsupervised topic modeling algorithm, the comparison chart indicates
that it is reliable to some extent. However, human intervention and validation become

No. Topic Keywords

1 Organizational support HR support; technical support; supportive; financial support; unsupportive;

mental support; help
2 Salary and growth Timely salary; salary cut; low salary; increment; appraisal; promotion;
growth; training
3 Organizational culture Work culture; organizational culture; teammates; work environment;
atmosphere
4 Job security Fire; forced resign; security of job; job security; lay-off; termination
5 Work from home wfh facility; working from home; wfh infrastructure; wfh support; flexible
work hours; work from home
6 Work-life balance Personal life; poor work-life balance; imbalance; no personal life; workload;
overload
7 Organizational politics Internal politics; politics; corporate politics; political power; office politics
8 Compensation and Leave benefits; extra pay; bonus; provident fund; increment; allowance
benefits
9 Employee safety Social distancing; sanitization; personal safety; safe; hygiene; medical;
insurance
10 Work intensity Target; business pressure; job pressure; job stress; work stress; workload;
depression
11 Skill development Skill; training; development; performance; official training; software training
12 Company policies Company policies; guidelines; strict policies; HR policies; mobility policies;
covid guidelines
13 Work-hours Shift timing; long working hours; office hours; work schedule; fixed working
hours
14 Job rotation Job rotation; staff rotation; multiple tasks; different roles; change in
responsibilities; change department
15 Job experience Work satisfaction; job satisfaction; good experience; happy; not satisfied;
frustrate; bad experience
16 Management Management; transparent management; managers; supportive management;
good management; top management
17 Discrimination/biases Biasness; gender biases; favoritism; discrimination; nepotism
18 Moral support Moral support; motivation; ethical
Table 3. 19 Recognition Recognition; reward; identify; acknowledge; appreciate
EX-factors identified 20 Work in pandemic COVID; corona; sanitizer; employee safety; care; pandemic; social distance;
from textual reviews mask; sanitization
 200 Decoding
180
158 employee
160
140
139
129
experiences
122
108 113 112
120 102 102
95 98
100 87
75
80 61 55 67
58
60 45 51 39
48
38 37
40 27
20
0
Org. support Salary and Org, culture Job security Work-life Employee Work Job Figure 5.
growth balance safety Intensity experience Review count of
Scholar A Scholar B LDA reviews containing
eight most common
Note(s): Org. support: organizational support; Org. culture: organizational culture; factors
LDA: Latent Dirichlet Allocation

essential. Further, we externally validated the identified EX-factors by comparing them with
the EX-factors studied and researched in the extant human resource management literature
(Aguinis and Burgi-Tian, 2021; Bryant and Allen, 2013; Charalampous et al., 2022; Farooq and
Sultana, 2022; Gheidar and ShamiZanjani, 2020; Mascarenhas, 2019; Pineda, 2021; Srinivasan
and Nachimuthu, 2022; Treuren and Fein, 2022; Yoon et al., 2021).

4.3 Sentiment and importance analysis

After identifying the EX-factors from the corpus of collected reviews, we performed
sentiment and importance analysis of individual factors. This analysis shows various
EX-factors’ overall sentiment and importance, as represented in Figure 6. In the figure, the
vertical and horizontal axis indicates the degree of importance and sentiments of the
EX-factors, respectively. The bubble size represents the relative number of reviews discussed
on a specific topic. Thus, according to Figure 6, Salary and Growth was perceived to be more
important than other EX-factors, but employees had a negative opinion about it. On the other

Overall
0.05

0.04
Importance

Salary & Growth; 28.89

0.03

0.02 Org. Support; 17.16

Org. Culture ; 15.65

WLB; 10.70 Employee Safety; 8.54

0.01
Job Experience; 6.99 Job Security; 6.56
Work Intensity; 5.52 Figure 6.
Sentiment and
0.00 importance of the
–0.5 –0.3 –0.1 0.1 0.3 0.5 0.7 0.9 identified EX-factors
Sentiment
PR hand, Organizational support and Organizational Culture were perceived as among the most
important and positive EX-factors. In addition, employees perceived Job Experience, Work-life
Balance (WLB), Job Security and Employee Safety as moderately important and expressed
positive sentiment regarding these EX-factors. Interestingly, employees expressed the most
negative sentiment regarding Work Intensity and perceived it as the least important EX-
factor.

4.4 Regression and dominance analysis

To determine the relative importance and causal significance of each of the seven exogenous
variables (i.e. Skill Development, Job Security, Company Culture, Work-Life Balance, Salary
and Benefits, Work Satisfaction and Career Growth) on the overall rating, we use regression
and dominance analysis. The results indicate that the regression model is statistically
significant (p < 0.001) at 95% level of significance. At the same level of significance, all of the
exogenous variables (except career growth) are also significant. The seven exogenous
variables explain 76% of variance in overall rating. The dominance analysis quantifies the
relative importance of individual variables by examining the average increase in R2 when the
variable is excluded from all potential regression models. The result of dominance analysis
signifies that among the seven exogenous variables, Skill development has the highest level of
importance (0.149) on the overall rating, followed by Company culture (0.126) and Work
satisfaction (0.119). The results of regression and dominance analysis are presented in Table 4
and graphically represented in Figure 7.
In addition, we performed multiple regression analysis to examine the impact of
sentiments (composite, positive and negative) and text attributes (subjectivity and review
length) on the overall rating. The result (see Table 5) indicates that the regression model is
statistically significant (p < 0.001) at 95% level of significance. All exogenous variables
(except positivity) are also significant at the same level of significance. The model explains
24.8% of the variance in overall rating. Out of these, compound sentiment has the most
significant impact (β 5 0.230; p < 0.001) on the overall rating, followed by negativity
(β 5 0.109, p < 0.001), review length (β 5 0.098, p < 0.001) and subjectivity (β 5 0.082,
p < 0.001). In line with the affective event theory, these results suggest that employee
sentiments stirred by the pandemic situation play a significant role in their rating behavior.

5. Discussion
Employees worldwide have experienced hardships in different spheres of life as a result of the
pandemic, leading to fluctuations in personal well-being, professional experiences and work
behaviors. Recognizing the significant contributions of employees in business organizations,

β Rel imp

Adj. R-square 0.760

Intercept 0.398
Work-Life Balance 0.168*** 0.116
Skill Development 0.318*** 0.149
Salary Benefits 0.077*** 0.087
Job Security 0.077*** 0.072
Table 4. Company Culture 0.183*** 0.126
Results of dominance Career Growth 0.008 0.088
and multiple Work Satisfaction 0.159*** 0.119
regression analyses Note(s): Rel Imp: Relative Importance; *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001
 Decoding
employee
experiences

Figure 7.
Graphical
representation of
overall path
coefficients

β t-stat

Adj. R-square 0.248

Intercept 3.730
Compound 0.230*** 10.918
Negativity 0.109*** 6.050
Positivity 0.023 1.378
Subjectivity 0.082*** 6.053 Table 5.
Review Length 0.098*** 7.352 Results of multiple
Note(s): IV: Sentiments and text attributes; DV: Overall rating; *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001 regression analysis

it becomes essential to comprehend different facets of employee experience. This research

aimed to identify the key determinants of employee experience during the pandemic through
online employee reviews and evaluate their respective sentiments and importance. In
addition, the significance of pre-defined job attributes and text attributes (subjectivity and
review length) on the overall employee experience was assessed. LDA based topic modeling
technique has identified twenty employee experience (EX) factors that shape employee
experience (such as, Employee Safety, Organizational Support, Moral Support, Job Rotation,
etc.). The factors identified have added to the other employee experience factors proposed by
Shambi (2021) (e.g. talent acquisition, training and development) and Yadav and Vihari (2021)
(e.g. cohesiveness, achievement orientation).
The result of topic modeling has identified employee safety (in terms of sanitization, social
distancing, hygiene practices, medical support, etc.), work from home (enhancing wfh
infrastructure support, flexibility, etc.) and moral support (counseling support, social support
for COVID-19 affected employees, etc.) found to be important factors in shaping employee
experience during the pandemic. In other words, these identified EX-factors indicate the
spheres of employee experience at the workplace that affect the corporate image and
reputation of the organization. Therefore, to maintain a good employer brand, it is
recommended that the business managers closely examine each of the EX-factors and
respective keywords that shape their employees’ experience. It would help business
organizations to create, attract and retain the best talent in the contemporary “war for talent”
(Mitchell, 2019).
PR The findings of sentiment and importance analysis demonstrate that employees perceived
Salary and Growth as the most important EX-factor and expressed negative sentiments. This
finding implies that during the pandemic owing to uncertainties, many organizations could
not enhance employee compensation and deferred career advancements, which could have
attributed for employees to express negative sentiments. During the pandemic, the
government issued a number of guidelines to follow the safety measures to control the
spread of the virus. Also, the government requested and persuaded employers to support
their employees and avoid their termination; most of the employers were considerate and
responded positively (Kobayashi et al., 2021). These could be the underlying reasons that
explain the positive sentiments and moderate importance of EX-factors: Organizational
Support, Employee Safety and Job Security. Notably, employees perceived Work-life balance
(WLB) as moderately important and negative. This finding, when read along with the
associated keywords, implies that the pandemic had a negative impact on the employees’
personal lives and workload, which are primary precursors of mental health and employee
wellbeing. However, employees perceived Work Intensity as relatively less important and
negative.
Further, to unearth the relevance of employee review on the overall employee
experience, we calculated the sentiments (composite, positive and negative) and text
attributes (subjectivity and review length) and performed multiple regression analysis.
The regression analysis highlighted the role of sentiments in shaping employees’ overall
experience. Researchers have found that negative sentiment has a stronger impact on the
overall experience than positive sentiment; our study reconfirms the same. In textual
reviews, employees write longer reviews to detail their unpleasant experiences in the
organization (Zhao et al., 2019). Therefore, review length had a negative effect on the
employee experience. In addition, employees often use online review platforms to complain
about their experience in the organization. Such reviews consist of more emotional words
and details as a consequence of frustration and anger of employees (Sparks and Browning,
2011). Hence, the subjectivity score exhibited a negative effect on the overall experience.
Further, in accordance with the previous research (Itam and Ghosh, 2020; Jung and Suh,
2019), the result of dominance and regression analysis underscored the importance of various
predefined job attributes (except Career Growth) in construing overall employee experience.
The insignificance of Career Growth is attributable to the untoward situations caused by the
pandemic where employees were more concerned with the continuous salary and job
security/stability than with professional training and development opportunities (Chanana
and Sangeeta, 2021). The findings of regression and dominance analysis reveal that Skill
development and Company culture are the most important EX-factors in shaping overall
employee experience. Many organizations have replaced conventional training programs
with online modes of training and skill development sessions during the pandemic. This
concept was altogether new and challenging to adopt without apt facilitators. In addition,
most of the employees perceived Org. Support and Employee Safety as positive EX-factors.
This implies that HR policies, as a key driver of Company Culture, helped employees in
various ways during the pandemic. Next, the Work-life balance was found to be a significant
predictor of overall employee experience. This finding, when read in light of the sentiment
analysis results, implies that WLB exhibits a significant impact on constructing the overall
EX. However, employees experienced poor work-life balance, as identified by the topic
modeling, which led to negative sentiments among employees about the policies and
practices related to WLB. Thus, to improve the EX, business managers are suggested to pay
attention to improving WLB and its primary antecedents, such as psychological well-being
and mental health.
5.1 Theoretical contribution Decoding
The theoretical implications of this study are manifold. First, this is one of few studies that employee
has attempted to explore the importance of qualitative and quantitative evaluations of the
various job aspects on the overall employee experiences during the pandemic. Though
experiences
previous studies have examined various employee variables during the pandemic, such as
employee engagement (Chanana and Sangeeta, 2021), employee satisfaction (Becker et al.,
2022), etc., the overall employee experience is less explored. Second, most of the prior research
on employee experience have predominantly employed survey questionnaire method to
collect the data; some of the studies have adopted qualitative method to study the employee
experience (Prajapati and Pandey, 2020; Neill and Bowen, 2020; Qin and Men, 2022; Shambi,
2021; Y€ uksel, 2017; Zacher and Rudolph, 2022). However, research examining employee
experience through online employee reviews is very few (e.g. Sainju et al., 2021). Addressing
this research gap, this study has considered online employee reviews to examine the
employee experience during the pandemic; topic modelling technique, sentiment and
importance analysis and regression and dominance analyses have been employed to evaluate
different parts (textual data and rating data) of online employee reviews. Previous research
has proven several advantages of text analysis techniques when compared with alternative
methods of data collection and analysis (Chatterjee, 2019; Jung and Suh, 2019). Using a large
number of online reviews to gauge employee experience promises to overcome some of the
constraints of traditional research methods (such as non-response bias, generalizability, finite
questionnaire questions, etc.) (Silveira, 2019), which have been used to measure employee
experience (Yadav and Vihari, 2021).
Third, the existing scale to measure the employee experience consists of only six
dimensions (Cohesiveness, Vigor, Well-being, Achievement Orientation, Inclusiveness and
Physical Environment), developed by Yadav and Vihari (2021). Though this scale
encapsulates many important factors that are an integral part of employee experience, the
present study explores a number of EX-factors that can be added to the existing scale and
empirically validated to enhance the explanatory power. For instance, Achievement
Orientation covers Skill Development and Salary and Growth; Organizational Support is
covered by Cohesiveness; Job Experience is a core part of Well-being. However, this scale has
not considered other important factors such as Organization Culture, Organization Politics,
Company Policies, to mention a few. Buckley et al. (2017) have underlined the potentially
hindering impact of the narrow scope of research scales on the quality of scientific inquiry.
Integration of these additional EX-factors into the existing EX measurement scale would
facilitate comprehending the detailed picture of employee experience in different situations.
Further, in the context of the AET theory, the identified EX-factors specify various
dimensions of jobs that are impacted by the external events (pandemic) and what impact
external stimuli exhibit on these job aspects. In that way, the findings of this study validate
the postulations of the AET theory and explore the avenues for further extension of the same.
Fourth, present study proposes a theoretical framework to enhance employee experience
(Figure 8) in the light of identified key EX-factors in this study and extant literature (Murlis
and Schubert, 2001). The proposed framework classifies the Ex-factors in seven EX-
dimensions: Work/Life Balance, Work Practices, Inspiration/Values, Enabling Environment,
Future Growth/Opportunities, Work Quality and Tangible Rewards. Each of these dimensions
consists of sub-dimensions in terms of the unique EX-factors identified through this study.
Thus, in alignment with the Hay Group’s six-dimensional model on engaged employee
performance (Murlis and Schubert, 2001), this research proposes a seven-dimensional
overarching framework on enhanced employee experience that advances the extant body of
knowledge on the antecedents of employee experience. This framework may guide
researchers in developing a comprehensive and parsimonious measure to study the
PR

Figure 8.
Framework for
enhanced employee
experience

employee experience in different contexts, as well as practitioners in enhancing the employee

experience and retaining employees, thus, optimizing talent management costs.
This study observed a significant difference in employees’ opinions in textual reviews and
rating data. This finding suggests that when employees are primed to rate their employers on
specific parameters, their evaluation behavior differs from reviewing independently.
Although quantitative ratings are more concrete in online reviews, qualitative reviews are
more abstract and all-encompassing. Hence, qualitative assessments have a greater power to
articulate abstract contexts, particularly those aspects that are not captured by aspect-based
ratings. This study highlighted the differential significance of textual reviews as a behavioral
construct and rating data as an attitudinal construct in describing employee experience.
Existing literature has recognized these two as separate constructs having unique features
(Chatterjee, 2019); this study reconfirms the same.

5.2 Managerial implications

The findings of this research propose a multitude of managerial implications. First, this study
identified 20 EX-factors using LDA. The business managers and practitioners need to
consider these factors and respective keywords to understand the gap between the
employees’ expectations and HR policies to deal with employees. Second, it is worth
mentioning that this study identified four new dimensions of employee experience (i.e.
Employee Safety, Organizational Support, Work Intensity and Management) that are not
considered in aspect-based rating (i.e. Skill Development, Job Security, Company Culture,
Work-Life Balance, Salary and Benefits, Work Satisfaction and Career Growth) by online
review websites. As shown by topic modeling, these EX-factors play a crucial role in shaping
employee experience. For instance, employees expect some degree of support and safety from
the organization irrespective of the type of industry (Lemon, 2019). Therefore, it is
recommended that online employee websites include these EX-factors in their aspect-based Decoding
ratings. It would make online reviews more comprehensive and helpful in finding the right employee
person-organization fit leading to a reduced attrition rate and optimization of talent
acquisition and management costs.
experiences
Third, the dominance analysis demonstrates that skill development is one of the most
significant factors in defining the total employee experience across industries, signaling that
training and development played a critical role in shaping employee experience in the
pandemic. The effectiveness and efficiency of training or skill development programs and a
potential hindrance to professional growth have been observed as one of the most important
drivers of great attrition (Smet et al., 2021). This finding could be attributed to the fact that
many organizations paid less attention to upskilling their employees and failed to channel the
potential of their employees through skill development. Therefore, management should focus
on increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of training programs and promoting a hybrid
employee training and skill development model. In addition, designing training programs
with an apt alignment of the organizational goals with employees’ professional growth would
enhance employee experience.
Fourth, the transfer of business from physical space to the digital domain is an ongoing
process in today’s business scenario. Organizations increasingly recognize the importance of
technology in not just automating labor but also improving the employee experience. The
epidemic has further explored the possibilities for firms to embrace a hybrid work paradigm
that allows employees to work remotely and plan to shift their mode of work to a hybrid work
model. In addition, the condition where a new virus or infection wave, or other similar
disrupting event appears is likely to reoccur (Farooq and Sultana, 2022); companies should be
prepared to react rapidly with action plans. These days, more and more organizations are
planning to sustain the positive changes that occurred during the pandemic, such as work-
from-home, flexible work hours, cost-optimized business models, etc (Manroop and Petrovski,
2022). Such transformation in companies influences employee experience and job
performance (Laiho et al., 2022). Since the importance of various EX-factors varies in
digital space from physical one, companies should focus on digital employee experience
(DEX) factors to match the pace of digital advancements and facilitate employees to adjust to
the virtual workspace. In light of the paradigm shift from physical workspaces to hybrid
work models, businesses are recommended to critically evaluate the interplay between
digitization and HR practices in the context of people management in order to achieve a
strong culture, agility and an enhanced employee experience (Eftimov, 2022). Business
managers should consider the drivers of DEX that affect employee job performance in virtual
workspaces, such as online employee engagement, infrastructure for home-office, online
employee interactions, employee productivity, mental health and work-life balance (Gheidar
and ShamiZanjani, 2020).
Finally, in terms of this paper’s originality, the major implication of this paper is that
business organizations should closely examine the extracted EX factors in light of the
associated keywords. For instance, “Work-life balance” is composed of personal life, workload
and balance in personal and professional lives. Similarly, “Organizational support”
encompasses HR support, technical support, financial support and mental support. The
pandemic had a sustaining impact on the firms’ policies, business operations and HR
practices. As a novel contribution, this paper paves the way for managers to shape and
enhance various aspects of employee experiences by offering key constructs of EX’s different
dimensions.
Further, in this paper, we highlight the importance of OER for business managers. As
OER are proven to be a better and more reliable source of information over time (Jung and
Suh, 2019), managers can utilize OER to find out how employees feel about the new changes
or policies introduced in the organization and respond accordingly. For instance, companies
PR can introduce planned changes or policies on a pilot basis, check employees’ reactions by
tracking and analyzing OER and modify the policies or decisions accordingly. Such real-time
employee feedback could facilitate participative decision-making and inclusive policy
framing in organizations.

5.3 Limitations and future directions

There are some limitations of this study that should be noted while interpreting the findings.
First, this study is focused on the employee experience during the pandemic. Therefore, though
the findings of this study facilitate developing a sound understanding of employee experience
while facing difficult times, some findings of this study (such as work in pandemic) could not be
extended to normal situations. Second, we used the LDA approach to identify the themes in
textual reviews. Existing research suggests LDA has an acceptable level of agreement, but we
found it to be low when compared to humans. Since LDA is an unsupervised learning algorithm
that requires no human intervention, it has some limitations in fully comprehending and
understanding natural languages. Future research may employ supervised learning algorithms
to derive employee experience factors from OERs. As human intervention is essential in
supervised learning algorithms (such as human tagging of reviews), they may effectively
identify employee experience topics from online reviews. However, they can only detect the
presence of each topic in “Likes” or “Dislikes” and cannot identify the topics which are not
tagged by humans. Third, future studies are recommended to collect and use all relevant
employee reviews to propose more generalized results. Since this study collected OER from
ambitionbox.com and conducted analyses based on the OER concerning employee experience
during the COVID-19 pandemic in India. Further, while studying employee experience, the
demographic factors of respondents are critical to drawing more insights. However,
demographic details are not explicitly available on these employee review sites. Hence,
future studies should consider including demographic factors for the analysis and make
recommendations on employee experience. Fourth, it would be prudent to undertake a
longitudinal study assessing the changing sentiments expressed in OER about different EX-
factors over time, i.e. from the beginning of the pandemic and towards the end of pandemic.
This would aid researchers and practitioners in comprehending the shifting paradigm of
employee experiences and fluctuating significance of various EX-factors.
Fifth, sentiment analysis considers consolidated scores to calculate sentiments. Though
previous studies have followed similar methods to analyze sentiments in different contexts
(Jung and Suh, 2019; Chatterjee, 2019), it may bring down the amplitude of specific aspects.
Future studies are recommended to examine employee experience using alternative methods
to overcome this limitation. Finally, present research uses secondary data (online employee
reviews) posted on Internet websites. Since online employee reviews are voluntarily posted
by employees and are self-driven, these reviews are of discretionary nature. Sometimes,
employees might be motivated to provide extremely positive or negative reviews. These
reviews have likely chances to alter the results. Thus, future research, along with textual
analysis, is recommended to carry out either qualitative or survey-based research to
corroborate the findings. This study has considered the subjectivity and examined its impact
on the rating data; however, subjectivity needs attention in the textual reviews to explore and
assess the relevance of individual differences in the employee experience.

6. Conclusion
Since mid-March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly influenced the global
economy, resulting in the closure of vast swaths of the economy. This abrupt change had
significantly impacted the employees in various ways. The purpose of the present study was
to explore the key drivers of employee experience during the pandemic by examining online Decoding
employee reviews, as well as to evaluate the sentiments and importance associated with the employee
various determinants of employee experience. In response to the proposed research
questions, this study identified twenty pertinent EX-factors that drove employee experience
experiences
during the pandemic through LDA based topic modeling approach. The multiple regression
analysis and dominance analysis revealed the relative importance of pre-defined EX-factors
to the overall employee experience. Furthermore, the significance of sentiments (composite,
positive and negative) and text attributes (subjectivity and review length) on the overall
rating was underscored through multiple regression analysis. By performing a set of
analyses based on the EX-factors and text attributes, we were able to obtain meaningful and
novel insights. This study extends the literature on the construct of “employee experience” by
exploring its various dimensions and opens new avenues for future research. The findings of
this study would facilitate managers in making informed decisions, provide employees with a
better experience during the adoption of the pandemic-caused sustainable business practices
(such as hybrid work model, digital workspaces, etc.), shape/enhance digital employee
experience and deal with possible future contingencies. Future research is advised to explore
the range of sentiments and emotions associated with different EX-factors, as well as how
their relative importance and sentiments have changed over time.

Notes
1. Source: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/marketstats/
2. Some terms (used in online informal communication) are missing from the lexicon used for
tokenization and POS tagging.

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(The Appendix follows overleaf)

PR Appendix

Review length*
Company no. Industry Review count Minimum Maximum Mean

Company 1 Automobile and Manufacturing 164 4 155 36.14

Company 2 Automobile and Manufacturing 119 4 202 39.19
Company 3 Automobile and Manufacturing 98 3 331 38.75
Company 4 Automobile and Manufacturing 38 4 152 39.89
Company 5 Engineering and Construction 17 8 98 32
Company 6 Engineering and Construction 216 3 165 33.35
Company 7 Engineering and Construction 42 4 130 37.19
Company 8 Engineering and Construction 23 5 125 36.52
Company 9 Engineering and Construction 98 3 124 36.34
Company 10 FMCG 55 4 142 29.09
Company 11 FMCG 61 4 131 33
Company 12 Banking and Financial Services 436 6 451 38.21
Company 13 Banking and Financial Services 459 4 334 40.33
Company 14 Banking and Financial Services 41 5 49 20.25
Company 15 Banking and Financial Services 32 4 314 49.61
Company 16 Banking and Financial Services 128 4 202 31.83
Company 17 Insurance and Financial Services 34 9 56 22.17
Company 18 Banking and Financial Services 144 4 242 36.97
Company 19 Banking and Financial Services 279 4 200 39.37
Company 20 Banking and Financial Services 29 4 68 24.11
Company 21 Insurance and Financial Services 46 4 101 37.07
Company 22 Telecom 58 12 275 63.85
Company 23 IT Services and Consulting 550 7 356 37.11
Company 24 Telecom 49 4 169 36.61
Company 25 IT and Consulting 204 3 252 39.11
Company 26 Telecom 321 3 304 41.24
Company 27 IT and Consulting 232 3 376 42.54
Company 28 IT and Consulting 415 3 407 35.38
Company 29 Telecom 177 4 336 33.82
Company 30 IT Services and Consulting 401 3 464 47.21
Company 31 Power and Petrochemicals 138 5 276 37.13
Company 32 Oil and Gas 34 7 166 39.55
Company 33 Petrochemical 33 6 163 47.96
Company 34 Power and Energy 15 8 103 37.86
Company 35 Power and Energy 23 8 244 51.95
Table A1. Company 36 Oil and Gas 14 6 367 67
Company wise review- Company 37 Power and Energy 15 5 144 49.73
count and review Note(s): *: Review length in terms of word-count; FMCG: Fast Moving Consumer Goods; IT: Information
length statistics Technology; Telecom: Telecommunication

Corresponding author
Arun Joshi can be contacted at: joshiarun72@gmail.com

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