Reuters :
When BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, evaluates potential stock purchases, its managers look at all the usual financial metrics.
Some of them also consider something much harder to quantify: employee sentiment.
“We look for companies that have solid employee rankings and want to buy companies that have improvements in employee opinions,” said Paul Ebner, a portfolio manager and member of BlackRock’s scientific active equity group, a team of quantitative managers. “Happy and engaged employees lead to more wins and more sales opportunities.”
That strategy is in line with a growing body of research suggesting that happy workers can be good for profits. But gauging employee satisfaction levels – and understanding how they might affect a company’s performance – can be tricky.
At BlackRock, which has more than $4.65 trillion in assets, the company’s 77-member quantitative team began adding data from social media websites, including employee sentiment data, into its models for evaluating holdings and investment prospects two years ago.
Today, 20 percent of the data used by the group to analyze companies is ‘unstructured’ – meaning it does not come as line items in analyst reports or regulatory filings. Employee sentiment is part of that, said Ebner.
When BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, evaluates potential stock purchases, its managers look at all the usual financial metrics.
Some of them also consider something much harder to quantify: employee sentiment.
“We look for companies that have solid employee rankings and want to buy companies that have improvements in employee opinions,” said Paul Ebner, a portfolio manager and member of BlackRock’s scientific active equity group, a team of quantitative managers. “Happy and engaged employees lead to more wins and more sales opportunities.”
That strategy is in line with a growing body of research suggesting that happy workers can be good for profits. But gauging employee satisfaction levels – and understanding how they might affect a company’s performance – can be tricky.
At BlackRock, which has more than $4.65 trillion in assets, the company’s 77-member quantitative team began adding data from social media websites, including employee sentiment data, into its models for evaluating holdings and investment prospects two years ago.
Today, 20 percent of the data used by the group to analyze companies is ‘unstructured’ – meaning it does not come as line items in analyst reports or regulatory filings. Employee sentiment is part of that, said Ebner.
