Detecting the Employee Satisfaction in Retail:

A Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Machine

Learning approach
Meenu Chaudhary Loveleen Gaur Amlan Chakrabarti
Amity International Business School Amity International Business School A.K. Choudhury School of IT
Amity University Amity University University of Calcutta
Noida, India Noida, India West Bengal, India
Email: chaudharymeenu1991@gmail.com Email: lgaur@amity.edu, Email: acakcs@caluniv.ac.in
gaurloveleen@yahoo.com

Abstract: Human resource management is one of the most
critical functions but is often overlooked, which can
impact the organisation in a negative manner. Employee
engagement, retention, job satisfaction, values, and
motivation are some of the important aspects. Proper
understanding and implementation in the workplace can
enable human resource managers or decision-makers to
make effective decisions regarding retention strategies,
recruitment and selection techniques, employer branding
and budget allocation. Traditionally, surveys, exit
interviews, annual evaluations, and informal interactions
were the primary source of data collection to identify
what employees feel about the organisation. With the
increase in the usage of platforms for posting online
reviews, researchers and decision-makers are making
appropriate use of text structured and unstructured
responses to identify and resolve issues. In this paper, we
have explored the electronic word of mouth in form of
employee reviews of five companies in the retail sector
using Latent Dirichlet Allocation in the first phase. In the
second phase, we collected the data from employees for
predicting employee satisfaction using IBM SPSS
Modeler 18.2.1. The top twelve topics are identified using
Latent Dirichlet Allocation and a word cloud is also
formed. We have also made the efficient use of predictive
analytics to predict the satisfaction among employees that
can contribute to the organisations in various forms. The
methodology followed in this paper addresses the gap of
using employee reviews and responses to evaluate the
employee satisfaction as researchers have focused on
using LDA for customer reviews and predictive analytics
is mostly used for employee churn. LDA technique is
often used in hospitality; however, no relevant literature
is available for retail employees.
Keywords: Employee satisfaction, Latent Dirichlet
Allocation (LDA), word cloud, Predictive analytics,
machine learning
I. INTRODUCTION
Employee turnover is the outcome of job
dissatisfaction which can cost up to twenty per cent of
the annual salary including hiring till exit cost [1]. The
retail industry is labour intensive and experiences high
employee turnover [2]. Frontline employees in retail
are the representatives of the employer and their
attitude can make or break the brand. Henceforth,
employee satisfaction cannot be overlooked as it is the
fundamental base for employees' perceptions and
attitudes towards the job. Extensive research has been
made on job satisfaction as it is one of the factors that
highly impact the effectiveness and financial
performance of the organisation. Employees with a low
level of satisfaction have less incentive to excel and, as
such, may deliver lower service quality [3], affecting,
in turn, corporate performance through the service
satisfaction-profitability link [4]. This increases the
necessity to understand the factors that affect the
degree of job satisfaction among employees. The
literature contains significant studies that evaluate the
determinants of job satisfaction and its impact of a
company's profitability [5].
Though job satisfaction has long history but the
measurement is limited to employee surveys and
interviews during entry and exit levels. The major
drawbacks of these traditional methods are biased
feedback and usage of sample size that may be
insufficient to draw the right inference. With the
development of information and communication
technologies (ICTs) and the increasing prevalence of
web 2.0 applications, people's interactions and sharing
of opinions on social media platforms have gradually
altered.
Approximately, eight per cent of online data is in
text form and a large amount of data is being produced
every day in the form of user-generated content (UGC)
that foster unstructured data [6]. Online reviews are
often used to increase the scalability of the business by
identifying the gaps and dissatisfaction among
customers. This study adds to our understanding of the
aspects and dynamics of job determinants, as well as
their relationship with job happiness, by taking into
account this previously untapped informational cue,
which comes directly from current and past employees.
Job listing sites like Glassdoor, Indeed and
ambitionbox are helpful for job seekers, particularly
when they lack internal connections to know about a
company's working circumstances. [7].
This paper also focuses on the employer's interest to
anticipate if the employees are satisfied or not using
predictive analytics. Academicians and organisations
are focusing on using machine learning and artificial
intelligence primarily for employee churn analysis.
However, if leaders and policymakers focus on
determining employee satisfaction, then it will reduce
employee churn to the utmost extent [8].
The rationale of this study is to:
• Usage of e-word of mouth in the form of
employee reviews for analysing employee
satisfaction using Latent Dirichlet Allocation.
• Predicting employee satisfaction using
machine learning algorithms.
• Contributing to the existing literature on the
usage of online reviews and machine learning
for exploring job satisfaction in retail
employees very less emphasis has been given
to date.
II. RELATED WORKS
OECD [9] defines employee satisfaction as the sense
of accomplishment and gratification while working in
a specific profession. Job listing services like
Glassdoor and Indeed are helpful for job seekers,
especially if they don't have inside connections to learn
about a company's working circumstances [7]. In the
context of retail literature, online employee reviews
present new prospects for the research of employee
satisfaction and performance; yet, this informational
cue has remained untapped until now [10]. The author
examined 400,000 reviews of over 2,200 companies on
Glassdoor that organizations with high employee
ratings performed 1.35% higher (than the market
average) in terms of returns [11]. The author reviewed
38,000 reviews from former, current and potential
employees to understand what factors to evaluate
employers using IBM Watson [12]. Through topic
modelling using LDA on employee reviews, Lee and
Kang [13] discovered that work satisfaction
components were positively associated with retention.
One of the topic modelling techniques, Latent Dirichlet
Allocation (LDA), posits that each document contains
probabilistically dispersed subjects and that each topic
can be represented by probabilistically dispersed words
[14]. Academicians have focused on customer reviews
to understand the dynamics to increase the profitability
of the organisation [15]. Extensive literature is not
available, henceforth we are contributing to the
existing literature for more detailed study.
Multi-criteria decision-making techniques have been
used for satisfaction and e-satisfaction [16] among
customers. Satisfaction of grocery e-retailers using
fuzzy TOPSIS and ECCSI model [17]. Moreover,
extensive research concerning employee reviews is
missing.
Trends in text classification have been increasing in
health, e-commerce, social media sentiment, and
product sentiment among customers [18]. Machine
learning (ML) has been widely used in healthcare [19]
[20], employee churn analysis [21], keyword extraction
[22], customer relationship management [23].
Predictive analytics have been widely used in finance,
marketing, and supply chain management and have
gradually been practised in human resource
management. The trend shows that machine learning
(ML) algorithms are used to predict employee churn;
however, job satisfaction which is one of the prime
causes of employee churn can also be predicted. ML
algorithms are more versatile and have an advantage
over structural equation modelling (SEM) and
hierarchical linear modelling (HLM) to handle
hundreds of variables in one statistical model [24].
Predictions not only serve to reduce staff attrition, but
also have an impact on a company's goodwill and
reputation. The author used four ML algorithms to
predict job satisfaction levels [25]. The authors have
researched analysing the product returns for improving
customer experience using LDA.
Based on the existing literature, authors have found
that much emphasis has not been given by
academicians and researchers to using machine
learning algorithms to predict job satisfaction among
employees in the retail sector. This research gap has
prompted the authors to include predictive analytics as
one of the objectives of this study.
III. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
This paper is divided into two phases to analyse
satisfaction among retail employees. The authors have
used the employee online reviews extracted through
web scrapping for Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Online
reviews were analysed using the programming
language Python. In the second phase of the study, the
authors have used the employee dataset to predict the
satisfaction at the workplace using IBM SPSS Modeler
for predictive analytics. The research workflow is
diagrammatically shown in Fig. 1.
 Number Number Number
Age
Gender of of Job level of
range
employee employe employee
Female 176 23-30 44 Job level 1 68
Male 191 31-40 43 Job level 2 73
41-54 62 Job level 3 70
Job level 4 80
Job level 5 76

Dataset was divided into training and testing datasets

in the ratio 80:20 using the partition node in IBM SPSS
Modeler version 18.2.1. XGradient Boost was selected
among support vector machine, linear regression,
CatBoost, and random forest based on the overall
accuracy of the classifiers/model. algorithm.

IV. DATA ANALYSIS

A. Latent Dirichlet Allocation

LDA provides relevant topics having the maximum

weights. The topics are presented by grouping the
Fig. 1: Methodology workflow keywords with the maximum possible occurrence,
distinguishing all topics from one another. The
prominence of the topics depends upon the size of the
A. Data Collection and Pre-processing bubbles. Further, the overlap of bubbles depicts the
The authors have used extracted 66,723 online presence of common keywords in the overlapping
reviews of five retail chains through web scrapping as topics. The bar chart attached with the map in LDA
shown in Table 1. Selenium library in Python was used visualization illustrates the local frequency of
to extract the review pages (unstructured data), and keywords found in topic 1.
then beautifulsoup library was used to gather the
reviews from the unstructured HTML data. The entire
dataset was then saved in a .csv file. The next step was
data pre-processing, which involves data cleaning,
where the unnecessary clutter was removed from the
data set.
TABLE 1: WEB-SCRAPPED DATA
_Occupatio Employm Ratin
n Role _Rank Author Company ent Occupation Place Review Raw g
Retail
Eazy cash for student who want to
Assistant
earn extra pocket money. Flexible
(Former Charles-&- Former Retail
Sales City Hall schedule. Required to work at least 3
Employee) - Keith Employee Assistant
one weekend per week. Nice people
City Hall -
to work with.
November 23,
Fashion Working in Charles and Keith is
Advisor definitely a good opportunity to meet
(Former Charles-&- Former Fashion Jurong with different kinds of people from
Sales 5
Employee) - Keith Employee Advisor point different profile , they provide proper
Jurong point - customer service trainings for the
July 7, 2020 staff and the best part is the working
Boutique Charles and Keith is a well known
Manager local brand in Singapore and Asian
Manage (Current Charles-&- Current Boutique Singapor countries. The working culture is fast-
3
r Employee) - Keith Employee Manager e paced and a quite stressful though
Singapore - since we are popular to tourist.
April 1, 2020 Everyday is a busy day at work but,

The questionnaire was sent to 479 people, out of which

398 responded. However, we have used only 367
responses as thirty-one responses were removed due to
incomplete information. The employee statistics on the
basis of age, gender and job level is mentioned in Table
2.
TABLE 2: EMPLOYEE STATISTICS
Fig. 2. LDA visualisation of top 6 topics
 Fig. 2 depicts the results of LDA using employee accuracy. We further analysed the factors that are
reviews to evaluate satisfaction. It illustrates the topic contributing to the satisfaction among employees.
distribution on one side and a bar chart of the key
phrases that reflect the selected topic on the other. The
frequency of each word is represented by the blue
colour bar, while the local frequency is represented by
the red colour bar.

A. Word Cloud

Word cloud depicts the most frequently words

expressed in the dataset and is a data visualisation
method to represent the insights of the data concerning
the associated frequency [26]. The word cloud
effectively helps identify the top words at first glance
than spotting the keywords from the table. Fig. 3 shows
the word cloud formed for the selected database. This
word cloud illustrates that word like 'work', 'job',
customer', management' has the highest frequency. On
the other hand, words like 'hard', 'typical day',
enjoyable part', and 'fun' have a lower frequency. The
word cloud represents that emphasis is on work,
customers are given priority, and management.
Fig. 4: Analysis of XGradient Boost for the used dataset
XGradient Boost algorithm predicted for target
variable 'satisfied' using ten input variables i.e., job
level, salary, recruitment type, department, work
location, education, awards, age, and rating. Fig. 4
depicts that 95.97% of predictions are made correctly.
The area under the curve (AUC) defines the ability of
the classifier/algorithm to differentiate between
classes. The higher the AUC, the better is the
performance of the classifier/algorithm in
distinguishing between negative and positive classes.
Gini coefficient measures the performance of the
binary classifiers and its value varies between 0 and 1.
The higher the Gini coefficient value, the better is the
model. AUC and Gini value for the XGradient is 0.991
and 0.982 respectively.

Figure 3: Word cloud

C. Machine learning algorithm

The employee dataset on job satisfaction was

analysed using five algorithms: support vector
machine, linear regression, CatBoost, random forest
and XGradient Boost. Result of these five algorithms is
shown in Table 3.
TABLE 3: COMPARITIVE RESULT OF MACHINE
LEARNING ALGORITHMS

Machine learning algorithms

Rando Support Linear
XGradien m Vector Regressi
Performance metrics

t Boost Forest Machine on CatBoost

Overall
Accurac
y 98.95% 93.05% 94.56% 82.78% 93.12%
Figure 5: Graphical visualisation of predictor importance
AUC 0.991 0.953 0.976 0.867 0.934

We selected XGradient boost for further analysis

based on the highest score (98.95%) of overall
Fig. 5 clearly states that 'job level' mostly contributes
to the satisfaction followed by the 'salary' of an
employee.
V. CONCLUSION
Although, online customer reviews have been
extensively used by researchers, however, employee
reviews have not been explored much. LDA technique
is often used in hospitality; however, no relevant
literature is available for retail employees. Studies
reveal that employee satisfaction in retail is on a lower
degree which results in employee churn on a higher
scale. This research gap is addressed in this paper by
analysing online employee reviews using Latent
Dirichlet Allocation to identify the top 12 topics in the
corpus. Based on word cloud analysis, it can be
concluded that employees in retail are not much
satisfied with the work and organisations should focus
on employee satisfaction to decrease the employee
turnover. Non-monetary factor 'job-level' impacts the
satisfaction of an employee as compared to monetary
factor 'salary'.
Data collected through a questionnaire was executed
using XGradient Boost to predict employee
satisfaction. The advantage of using ML algorithms is
that it provides the prediction for each employee. This
model can be implemented in the organisations to find
the employees who are not satisfied and can formulate
strategies accordingly.
Our paper provides a better insight on satisfaction
among retail employees using LDA and machine
learning which is missing in the existing literature. The
reasons are: employee satisfaction is analysed for
hospitality employees using LDA and machine
learning algorithms have not been efficiently used
predicting employee satisfaction.
VI. LIMITATIONS AND DIRECTIONS FOR
FUTURE RESEARCH
We have used employee reviews of five companies;
however, the horizon can be increased in future studies.
Also, more data can be processed using the ML
algorithm for the prediction of employee satisfaction in
the IT sector as it experiences the highest employee
churn.
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