Far from a mad crowd

In the summer of 2007, three successful and highly experienced online businessmen wondered what would happen if somebody found a company’s entire employee survey on a printer and decided to post it on the web.

Glassdoor.com is the brain-child of Robert Hohman (ex-president of Hotwire), Rich Barton (founder of Expedia) and Tim Besse (also ex-Expedia). The website launched in late August following beta trials and inception earlier in the year. The initial idea expanded and the website now offers three revealing free services.

Firstly, it provides detailed company reviews that encourage employees to highlight the pros and cons of working for a firm while offering advice for senior management. Presumably the dilemma between criticising the company you work for with the potential to damage your own market value, versus the desire to ‘offload’ keeps the feedback honest. Whatever the motivation, I didn’t read many hot-headed reviews. There is the exciting potential to provide canny employers with a no holds barred insight into what employees really think about company management and strategy (or perhaps more importantly their perception of strategy).
Secondly, Glassdoor provides a vehicle for employee ratings on workplace factors and leadership. The website asks employees to rate their employer against a range of criteria, such as work-life balance and benefits. They are also requested to provide a CEO approval rating which is shown as a score.

Finally, and perhaps the ‘killer’ element of the website, is that it provides real time salary information by company and by title. This means I can see, for example, that a senior consultant at Deloitte has an average salary of $95,723 while a senior manager receives a salary of $162,140. Useful and interesting information for both employee and employer.

The fact that all this information stems from real employees is the crucial point of differentiation for Glassdoor. It is free to use and all the information is ‘anonymised’ so there is no fear of your employer finding out if you say something less than complimentary about the company. It is pure genius, and surely it won’t be long before this innovative site is supported with advertising revenue, or becomes integrated with job listing sites, providing pie-chart ratings and average salary insights as extra dimensions to recruitment decisions.

The use of a “wisdom of the crowd” approach in business is becoming increasingly well documented; are ‘the many’ really ‘smarter than the few’? I recently reviewed Gary Hamel’s book, ‘The Future of Management’, and this theme is used as the basis for his ideas. Perhaps the collective staff within a company is more insightful than individual economists? If I were a CEO I’d certainly be interested to see how my rating fared compared to those of my peers, and would find it irresistible to tap such a unique knowledge base.

Glassdoor provides a legitimate opportunity for crowd insight to begin steering a company’s strategy, and one that forward thinking businesses should surely try and harness rather than ignore. Sadly I suspect it might be a long while before employers actually use it, no doubt choosing to dismiss it initially as just a report on the extremes.