Is love in the air? While employees may like their jobs, what makes them love them? In celebration of Valentine’s Day, we use Revelio Labs’ HR data to explore mentions of love in employee reviews.
Mentions of love appear in around 5.3% of reviews written by employees in the US. Despite the relatively low overall share of reviews that mention love, some companies still receive glowing recommendations from their employees. PetSmart leads companies with the most love mentions: 15.7% of its employee reviews contain the word. Clothing and beauty stores, such as Ulta, Victoria’s Secret, and Sephora (along with other companies in the LVMH group), also make up much of the top ten.
Interestingly, we find that mentions of love in reviews don’t necessarily correlate with either increased employee sentiment or employee retention overall. Instead, love mentions seem to be an indicator of how expressive, on average, the employees in a given company are.
This is particularly striking when we break out the analysis by role. Some roles attract more effusive personalities than others - for example, more than 10% of employees in bookseller, nanny, and beauty-related roles, which place a large emphasis on enthusiasm and human connection, mention love in their reviews. Engineers, on the other hand, fall on the opposite end of this spectrum, with only around 2% mentioning the L-word in their reviews.
Finally, we examine the text of these reviews to see what employees love about their jobs. We find that people and culture are top of mind when it comes to love: Employees who mention love in their reviews are especially positive about their work environment and team, which could again reflect how these employees appreciate the element of human connection.
Still, given the lack of relationship between love mentions and overall job satisfaction, our HR data show that when employees drop the L-word, it is often more about them and less about their work. In the end, love at the workplace seems to be in the eye of the beholder.
