A company formerly known as Facebook is no longer the dream work place they once were: Meta Platforms dropped 36 spots to number 47 on Glassdoor’s annual ranking of the best places to work for 2022, the company’s lowest ranking in the 12 years it made the list, this comes after the company ranked 11th last year. Meta employees blamed unwanted public scrutiny, lack of action from leadership and questions about the company’s future for their lowered ranking of the company as an employer. The rankings are made based on anonymous employee feedback working in thousands of companies.

Tech companies dominated the 100-entry list, making up 40% of the US’ best employers “thanks in part to their flexible work environments, consistent support throughout the pandemic, and a focus on better pay, benefits, and work-life balance,” Glassdoor said in a blog post.

Computer systems design services company Nvidia topped the list, with 95% of its employees saying that they would recommend the company to a friend and 98% approving of the company’s current head, Jensen Huang.

Toxic work culture, not pay, is driving the Great Resignation, finds a new study published in MIT Sloan Management Review. The study found that company culture was 10.4 times more likely to predict employee attrition, with toxic workplace culture defined as abusive leadership, discrimination, harassment and a cutthroat environment. While higher wages are driving mns of people to quit their jobs, an analysis of more than 1.4 mn Glassdoor reviews found that workplace culture was 12.4 times more likely than wages to predict whether an employee stayed with a company — a trend that held true for front-liners and knowledge workers. Other predictors of employee attrition included job insecurity, poor response to covid and lack of employee recognition.

---

AI may be able to listen to your CEOs’ conversations — and give investment advice accordingly, reported Reuters. Natural language processing (NLP) — a branch of AI that uses machine learning to make sense of language and turn it into signals used by quant funds — attempts to analyze the tones, cadence, and emphasis of words, in addition to phraseology. In one experiment, NLP software found that tech executives spoke in a worried tone but used reassuring words about a looming semiconductor and supply chain crisis in 2020. Think of it as a really advanced lie detector.

Advocates of the technology claim that it can make sense of data like analysts’ phone calls, Q&As and interviews with the media to glean insights — this in spite of an absence of quantifiable proof to show that these AI systems, which cost mns, can provide financial returns. The tech has proven useful in finding patterns, however, such as showing a correlation between the simplicity of executives’ language during earning calls and companies’ share performance. Other companies are utilizing NLP to analyze written text or successfully quantifying assessments of corporate culture, which may prove to be useful in ESG monitoring.