Hybrid is Glassdoor's Word of the Year

Key Findings

In a year dominated by uncertainty and confusion, how have people’s discussions around the labour market changed? Glassdoor’s access to millions of employee insights allows us a unique look into employees’ thoughts about their workplace experience. To answer this question, we analysed hundreds of thousands of reviews in 2020 and 2021 from UK-based employees by examining the share of total reviews that words appeared in, as well as how many times each of those words were used. 

In many ways, discussion in Glassdoor reviews has reflected themes in the broader UK labour market. As companies have begun to return to the office, employees are increasingly working in a hybrid work environment – one that combines working from home and office work. On a similar note, WFH – an acronym representing working from home with strongly positive sentiment in 2020 – has seen increasingly negative reviews in 2021 as the pandemic drags on and employees feel unsupported in their work environments.

Other words reflect a broader dissatisfaction with the employee experience, like gaslighting and burnout. Broader fiscal trends are also impacting employees’ everyday lives, with inflation and (salary/pay) hike discussed significantly more in 2021. And trends that began before 2021 – like the swell in calls for more diversity and inclusion initiatives in the workplace – have been reflected not only by pledges and goal-setting by companies but also by an increase in related words like inclusivity in Glassdoor reviews.

Hybrid: Our Word of the Year

Hybrid is Glassdoor’s word of the year. The word hybrid saw a larger increase in usage than any other word in Glassdoor’s reviews, rising 1,290 percent in 2021 from the year before. In addition, the percentage of reviews mentioning hybrid at least once has grown by 1,074 percent – a more than tenfold increase! These increases reflect the rise of a workplace environment – a mix of working from home and in-person work – far less common before the pandemic but one that has increasingly become the new normal for many office workers.

Glassdoor’s employee reviews often praise hybrid work schedules alongside flexible hours or remote work, with 38.9 percent of reviews that discuss hybrid also containing mentions of flexible, flexibility or remote. Even when mentioned in the cons section of reviews, employees often denounce the lack of hybrid working rather than complain about its existence.

Runners Up

Gaslight

The percentage of reviews mentioning gaslighted (or closely related words like gaslighter or gaslighting) has more than doubled (a 102 percent increase) from 2020. Gaslighting refers to a type of manipulation in which the manipulator is trying to convince someone else to disbelieve their own experience. Though gaslighting has traditionally been used in discussing interpersonal relationships, it appears to have made its way into the world of work – just like the term ghosting. 

Gaslighted is used almost entirely negatively, with 98 percent of mentions from the ‘cons’ section of Glassdoor reviews. This increase partly reflects a heightened dissatisfaction with the workplace experience and partly increased usage of the term gaslighting – Google Trends data shows a slow increase in searches for the term over the past five years, followed by a sharp rise in recent months. Employees using the term describe offices or managers that pretend to care about their wellbeing and careers while secretly undermining both.

Inclusivity

2020 saw a wave of calls for companies to take action on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Many of those pledging to answer the call published their first reports on diversity and inclusion in their workplaces in 2021. In recent research, Glassdoor’s team predicted that discussion around DEI will only grow in 2022 – claims supported by the immense growth in DEI-related keywords in 2021.

The share of reviews discussing inclusivity has grown 45 percent in 2021. While most sentiment around inclusivity is positive, accounting for 72 percent of mentions, not all related terms are viewed in a universally positive light. While the word diversity also showed growth in 2021, it tended to draw mixed sentiment, with a 55/45 percent split in negative/positive mentions.

Burnout

As the pandemic drags on, workers are feeling increasingly burnt out and that’s showing up in their reviews. Between 2020 and 2021, the share of reviews mentioning burnout at least once jumped by 58 percent. As shown in previous research, most of this growth came over this past summer, with the share of reviews discussing burnout shooting up by 128 percent between April and September of 2021.

WFH

Although WFH (short for ‘working from home’) elicits mostly positive sentiments, its usage has trended negatively between 2020 and 2021. In 2020, WFH saw huge growth from 2019 – mostly in the pros sections of reviews. In 2021, while WFH again saw increases (with the share of reviews mentioning it up 36 percent from 2020), a great deal of this growth came from increasingly negative sentiment. 

Examining discussion in either the pros or cons section of a review, the proportion in the pros section fell from 69 percent in 2020 to 62 percent in 2021 – a 7 percentage point decrease. This may be a reflection of many employees’ – especially younger ones – disappointment at their inability to return or feel connected to the office while working from home. Many negative reviews on WFH cite the lack of support offered or difficulty onboarding, emphasising the importance of expanding the workplace community beyond the office for employers who value a strong employee experience.

Inflation & Hike

Inflation is in the news – and it’s also in employees’ minds. Inflation, which reached 5.1%  in November 2021, has increased to highs not seen in decades as a response to increased demand from the lifting of coronavirus restrictions, increased savings for many households and the reduced labour supply and supply chain disruptions from COVID and Brexit.

The usage of the words inflation and hike – normally used by Glassdoor reviewers to refer to an increase in pay – have grown immensely over the past year. The share of reviews discussing inflation has increased 57 percent, while those mentioning hike have grown by 92 percent. Both words draw mainly negative sentiment, with employees discussing how salary hikes have failed to keep pace with inflation.

Conclusion

Unsurprisingly, new modes of work have preoccupied employees’ minds over this past year, with hybrid working and wfh (working from home) both seeing an immense amount of growth. Employees have also been concerned by broader developments in the economy and culture, with many discussing how inflation undermines their pay rises or how their companies have demonstrated inclusivity – or a lack of it. These trends also provide a guide for the factors that are top of mind for employees heading into the new year. As 2022 shapes up to be a historically tight labour market, it will be more important than ever for employers to focus on what employees care about to attract and retain workers.

Methodology

To analyse how reviews have changed over time, we examined the pros and cons sections, as well as the entire review (which includes pros, cons, and feedback), separately for all reviews in 2020 and 2021. 2021 reviews are as of December 12, 2021.

We removed common words that do not add much meaning to a sentence, called stopwords, from all reviews and grouped together different forms of the same word (for example, ‘ran’, ‘run’ and ‘running’ would all be grouped), a process known as lemmatisation.

We then calculated the percent change between 2020 and 2021 in usage for each word, along with several commonly-used two-word or three-word phrases, in each review section – pros, cons or the entire review. Word usage was calculated by summing the number of times each word appeared, then dividing it by the total number of times every word appeared in each review section. 

In addition to percent change in overall word usage, we also examined percent change in the share of reviews containing at least one mention of each word. These two measures are not identical, as many words are used multiple times in the same review. Percent change in review share gives an idea of what people are talking about, while percent change in word usage shows how intensely these topics are discussed. 

We define a mention of a word as positive if it appears in the pros section of a review and negative if it appears in the cons section. When calculating the proportion of mentions that are positive or negative, we use (number of mentions in pros + number of mentions in cons) as our denominator. Significance is calculated using a two-tailed two-proportions hypothesis test.