🧡 Making Sense of Employee Reviews

Hello & Happy Summer (it’s official!)

A few weeks back, I had the pleasure of joining Matt and Crista Vance on The Culture Profit Podcast to talk about one of my favorite topics: management. (anyone surprised?)

You can catch the episode here if you missed it. We tackled the big question, Can anyone learn to lead well?

While prepping for the conversation, I got a sneak peek into Matt’s world of employee reviews, specifically, the external kind. You know…the ones on Glassdoor and Indeed that sometimes send leadership teams into quiet (not so quiet?) panic.

Matt is the Co-Founder & CEO of Mobrium and has spent years helping companies turn those reviews into a real driver of culture and reputation, not just a reactive clean-up effort.

We knew immediately this was a conversation our newsletter readers would want in on. So, we asked Matt some of the most common questions we hear when it comes to employer reviews, perception gaps, and public vs. private feedback.

If you’ve ever wondered how to improve your ratings without crossing ethical lines, what to do when your internal reality doesn’t match your external image, or how to simply start collecting more balanced reviews, Matt’s insights will help you take that first step with confidence.

Dig in and let us know what stands out!

Yours in building a reputation worth reviewing,

Jill

1. Let’s start with a quick intro! Who are you, and why does the topic of employee reviews matter to you personally?

Hi, I’m Matt. I’m a social innovator and Co-Founder & CEO of Mobrium, where I help companies build stronger cultures with better employer ratings and reviews on sites like Glassdoor and Indeed. I also co-host The Culture Profit Podcast, wrote The Review Cycle, and speak on how feedback can transform leadership. Outside of work, I’m a family guy who loves running, biking, hiking, and dad jokes.

2. How do you think about the difference between internal feedback (like employee surveys or eNPS) and external reviews (like Glassdoor)? What can leaders learn from each?

I know there are a lot of fans out there of eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score). It is a great metric to see how satisfied your employees are with their work experience.

The big problem though is nobody sees your eNPS. It’s private. Because it’s private, your eNPS doesn’t impact perceptions and behaviors. Yes, you can use your score to inform decisions, but the score doesn’t do anything for you on it’s own.

On the other hand, employer star ratings and reviews on sites like Glassdoor are public. Everyone can see them. Your job seekers use them to decide if they should apply. Your employees reference them to decide if they should quit. Your customers view them as a reflection of your service quality and may not buy from you if they are bad.

A company can have great internal engagement survey metrics and poor employer ratings and reviews. We see it all the time. And over time, culture can slump as the public-facing employee feedback acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The opposite can happen as well. Culture can be lifted from the outside-in by proactively asking for employee reviews, which lifts ratings.

Bottom line, leaders should be prioritizing their public employee feedback above private employee feedback - because the public feedback is what shapes perceptions and behaviors.

3. What should employers do when the story being told inside the company doesn’t match what’s being said publicly?

Taking a step back, most companies I’ve spoken with don’t have systems to accurately detect if public employee reviews are not reflective of reality. To do this, a company must have reliable data sets of both internal employee feedback (such as employee engagement surveys) and external employee feedback (like Glassdoor reviews). If both data sets have a large enough sample size, then the two can be compared to look for misalignments.

In chapter 5 of my book, The Review Cycle, I share a model I developed called The Perception Matrix. Similar to a SWOT analysis, it has 4 quadrants that let you make comparisons for decision making. We’re contrasting the legitimate (internal feedback) with the perceived (external employee reviews). As we evaluate top positive and top negative themes from the comments, we can diagnose misalignments.

For example, say your internal survey shows employees are generally satisfied with their PTO, and your policy is objectively above average. But then you notice that “not enough PTO” is a top complaint in external reviews. That’s not a legitimate issue, it’s a perceived one. The answer isn’t to increase PTO days. Instead, it’s about closing the perception gap. That could mean encouraging employees to utilize their PTO days more frequently, ensuring managers have the autonomy to approve PTO requests, making your PTO policy more visible during onboarding and review cycles, or sharing how it stacks up against industry benchmarks.

All of these will help improve perceptions and behaviors for the better.

In my book, I unpack this approach further and outline seven common scenarios across experience drivers (like PTO) and what to do in each case, whether you’re facing a true misalignment, a perception problem, or both.

The Review Cycle: Image provided courtesy of Matt R. Vance©, 2022Section Subheading

4. What’s one piece of advice about employee feedback or reviews that you wish every company knew?

Great question! I would say that there is a way to legally and ethically improve employer ratings and reviews.

Many companies we speak with feel scared of asking for reviews or responding to reviews. And yes, there are things you shouldn’t do that are actually illegal and/or against community guidelines of Glassdoor and other platforms. For example, you don’t want to incentivize employee reviews. You also don’t want to ask for positive reviews or 5-star ratings. It’s best to just ask for honest reviews.

As long as you’re following FTC guidelines and community guidelines you can ask employees for reviews. (Sidenote, we have a great article regarding FTC’s newest legislation relating to online reviews you can read HERE.) You have the right to ask for that feedback and asking is the number one way to improve ratings simply by getting more feedback from a representative sample of your workforce. When you don’t ask for reviews, the negative tends to get over-represented. Increasing participation unlocks the silent majority of employee feedback and lifts your star rating.

If you want to try this on your own, start simple. Make a list of all employees and send the same standardized review request in batches for Glassdoor, Indeed and more. It's important to spread review requests out over time so there are always recent reviews for job seekers to find. In your standardized review request be sure to mention what is in it for the employee- that their voice matters by helping inform company culture initiatives and attracting job seekers that are aligned with your mission. And be sure to never incentivize employee reviews as this is against the terms of service for most employer review sites. If you’re ready to scale the process, Mobrium automates these requests and helps manage your reputation across platforms with full FTC compliance. Feel free to schedule a meeting or email me directly at: [email protected].

Either way, the key is to ask. And to do it in a genuine way.

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