Culture Intelligence FAQs

A quick 7-minute run through of how to use the Deltabase Platform.

Deltabase is a Company Benchmarking and Intelligence platform. You can search for a company and get rapid and accurate actionable intelligence to enable you to benchmark a target company against its competitors.  We work for Deals teams who are targeting companies for investment, Consultancies that are targeting companies to identify consulting opportunities, and corporates who are interested in benchmarking themselves against their peers.

The Deltabase platform is presently focused on Culture analysis.  We get publicly facing reviews on companies by employees, we use our AI models to analyse these against a set of topics.  We look at topics on the Culutre and the Employee Value Proposition of companies to assess what employees are saying about them and calculate a Net Sentiment Score (NSS) on their performance.  You can then benchmark this against a competitor peer set of sector peers and non-adjacent exemplars to identify strengths, culture gaps and opportunities.

Deltabase also gathers other company intelligence data.  All the data we gather is public and commercially available ‘outside-in’ with no access to the companies assessed.  We get data on Skills and Recruitment, Technology in use, Operating Model, Customer Sentiment, and many others.  Full information on our range of products and services can be found on our website: https://deltabase.io.

Please get in touch if you’d like to find out more about any of our product and services and how we can work together to drive value for you from our benchmarking and intelligence.

Currently our platform is focused on our Culture Benchmarking products, but we will soon be introducing new data sets such as Skills & Recruitment benchmarking, Technology In use and other products which we currently deliver outside of the platform.  Sign up to our mailing list to be kept posted on the latest developments here: https://deltabase.io

Deltabase has a whole suite of company intelligence products that we can run on target companies and their competitor peer sets outside of our platform.  You can see a full range of our products on our website at https://deltabase.io.

If you’re interested in finding out more about these products, then please reach out to the Deltabase team, or drop us an email at info@deltabase.io.

To change your password to log in to the Deltabase platform, select the Change password link on the login page when you first go to the platform link.  It will ask you for your email address, and if valid will send you a link to set a new password to log in.

To change your password to log in to the Deltabase platform, select the Change password link on the login page when you first go to the platform link.  It will ask you for your email address, and if valid will send you a link to set a new password to log in.

To log out of the Deltabase platform, then select your email address at the top of the page, and select the Sign out option:

No, you are not permitted by your license agreement to share you login credentials with other users.  If you have colleagues who would like to get access to the platform, then please get in touch with the Deltabase team who would be delighted to facilitate arranging this.

To find a company to add to a peer set, then use the Search bar at the top of the Peer Set Builder page:

Just start typing in the name of the company in the Search for companies… box, and the relevant results will appear in the list underneath.  Use the check box to add a company to your peer set, it will then appear in the peer set list above the results.  You have 5 slots in your peer set to add companies to.

Use the Order Companies button at the top of the Peer Set Builder page to request new companies to be added to your company’s Datastore of company data.

You can benchmark 5 companies in a peer set.  This is the optimum number of companies that you can compare on the charts at one time.

Once you’ve found the companies you’re looking for, check the box next to them to add them to the peer set.  Once you have your peer set, hit the Benchmark button, and that will take you to the Culture Analysis page where you can explore the data.

The Review Count Indicator on the Peer Set Builder shows how many reviews have been captured for this company in the 2019-2023 analysis time frame.

The indicator shows the signal strength in terms of number of reviews available. Where this is >250 the indicator shows OK, where it’s <250 it is marked as Low.  When a company has a Low review count, then some topics may get a signal warning.  Check the Signal Warnings section of the Culture Analysis page once you’ve hit the Benchmark button on a peer set.

The Review Count indicator shows a truncated number (e.g. 1.5k). You can see the full Total Reviews counts in the Review Extracts section of the Data Deep Dive page.

Yes, if you want to see data on a single company, then search for it, add it to the peer set, then hit Benchmark, and you’ll see the data on the single company.  No need to add a peer set if not required.

In the Peer Set Builder, the Seach Filters button will allow you to select filters to narrow down the list of companies you’re seeing:

The filters available include:

• Sector
• Headcount
• HQ Location

Simply select those you need, and hit the Apply button:

Net Sentiment Score (NSS) is a metric that captures the overall sentiment—whether positive, negative, or neutral. It is calculated by taking subtracting the percentage of negative reviews from percentage of positive reviews to leave a net.

This gives a net score from -100% where all the reviews are negative to +100% where all the reviews are positive.

Anything between -20% and +20% is deemed as a Neutral score.

We gather online reviews as the source data for the analysis.  We are constantly working to expand the number of sources that we use to gather reviews to make it as diverse and wide-reaching as possible.  Other sources can be included in analysis on request, such as regional local sources, employee survey data etc., where we can complete analysis outside of the platform.  Speak to a Deltabase representative to find out more, or email us at info@deltabase.io.

We sometimes hear this perception from customers that reviews gathered from online sources have a preponderance to negative reviews by employees just complaining about a company.  To investigate this we did some research on our data set of 2.5 million reviews across all companies, looking at the % of Favourable reviews – 4* or 5* reviews – and  Unfavourable Reviews – 1* or 2* reviews, with neutral reviews being those in between.

70% of the total review base was Favourable, and 11% were Unfavourable.

So, it is a misconception that the majority of reviews on the platform have a negative bias.

The Deltabase culture assessment framework covers 12 topics, with 6 on Culture, and 6 on Employee Value Proposition:

For all of the topics that we cover in the platform there is an overall question that they are addressing, outlined in the first column of the table below. Also see the Positive and Negative themes are addressed by each topic:

Sentiment Topic		Typical POSITIVE Themes	Typical NEGATIVE Themes
CULTURE TOPICS
	Supportive Do employees feel supported by their leaders and managers?	Supportive / understanding leadership Open communication from above Accessible and approachable management Management showing respect for individuals	Management not caring for employees Lack of communication from management Lack of access to management Management placing demands on employees that are viewed as unreasonable and/or unrealistic
	Progressive Is the company forward-looking and open to evolve?	Progressive, forward-looking company Openness to new ideas, feedback and new ways of working Appetite to take risks and experiment Dynamic, fast-paced workplace Innovation	Traditional company with ‘old school’ mindset and ways of working Lack of innovation and closed-minded to new ideas Conservative approach to risk (i.e. risk aversity) Slow, staid, political workplace
	Empowered Do employees have the freedom and autonomy to experiment and innovate?	Employees given freedom and autonomy Flat structure without undue hierarchy Employees given responsibility and trusted to deliver	Autocratic or dictatorial management style Overly hierarchical structure Lack of freedom or autonomy Micromanagement
	Collaborative Do people work together effectively within and across teams?	Teamwork within teams Peer-to-peer support and assistance Collaboration between teams / departments Collaboration across geographical boundaries	Unhelpful or unsupportive behaviour within teams (e.g. “backstabbing”) Lack of collaboration across teams, departments, geographies Team rivalries Organisational silos
	Agility & Bureaucracy Does the company have efficient processes, free from red tape, and is it quick to adapt to change?	Agile ways of working Ability to adapt and adopt change Efficient, streamlined processes Efficient decision-making Effective meetings	Red tape, bureaucracy and process that gets in the way Slow decision-making Slow, broken or inefficient processes Lack of agility or capacity to adapt Too many (or ineffective) meetings
	Diversity & Inclusion Do employees feel that the workplace is inclusive, diverse and free from bias or discrimination?	Support for the D&I agenda (ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social backgrounds) No discrimination Promoting fairness Diversity of employee base or management	D&I agenda not promoted or paid lip service Discrimination (racism, sexism, bias) Lack of diversity within employee base or management
EMPLOYEE VALUE PROPOSITION (EVP) TOPICS
	Purpose Do employees feel that the company and their work are impactful?	Mission-driven company Employee awareness of company vision Employees agree with the strategic direction of the company	Prioritising profit over purpose / mission Lack of clarity or awareness of company vision Employees unaware of or in disagreement with the strategic direction of the company
	Pay & Rewards How do employees rate their pay, benefits and other perks?	Salary, benefits, bonus Employee perks Pay rises / salary reviews	Salary / benefits / bonus perceived to be below sector averages Remuneration not commensurate to responsibility / hours / stress
	Work-Life Balance How do employees feel about their working hours and stress levels?	Flexibility on working hours and location Reasonable levels of stress/pressure	Long hours, weekend working Undue work stress & pressure Lack of flexibility to balance non-work commitments
	Career Progression Do employees feel like there is fair opportunity for progression and advancement within the firm?	Opportunities to get promoted Opportunities to switch role / geography / team	Lack of opportunity to progress Opaque performance management / promotion processes
	Learning & Development Do people feel like the company provides ample opportunities for learning and invests in training?	Opportunity to learn Onboarding / induction training Investment in formal training Support for accreditations / qualifications	Lack of learning opportunities Poor quality or insufficient training Lack of investment in formal training Lack of support for accreditations / qualifications
	Workplace Technology Do employees feel like they have the right tools and systems to help them operate effectively?	Cutting-edge technology Systems and tools to help make work life easier Quality of company’s own technology products	Broken systems that crash and get in the way Legacy technology, dated systems, technical debt Poor technology development standards (e.g. development, QA, release management)

In the Culture Analysis page you can apply filters on the Companies that apply to all the tables and charts on the page.  You can also apply Topic filters to the individual sections of the charts.  Here’s a rundown of how.

To filter the companies that appear on all the charts, select the Company Filters button at the top of the screen

This brings up the Company Filters selection box, where you can switch on the Mean line on the charts, which show the peer set mean for the companies you have in the peer set.

You can also de-select the companies from your peer set that you don’t want to appear in the charts and tables.

Just click Apply to put them into effect.

The Reset button will remove any filters and the Mean that you have selected to return to default setting.

Once you have a Filter set, you will see the number of filters applied appears next to the Company Filters button.

Note: Filtering a company out does not recalculate the peer set mean, just removes the company from view on the charts and tables.

After you’ve hit Benchmark on your peer set, you might notice that there are some Signal Warning highlighted for your peer set.  The show in the tabs for the Overview section.

This shows the number of topics across the peer set selected that have a low review count on a Topic.

Clicking into it shows the Topic by company and what the low review count is.  Having a topic triggered by <10 reviews will result in a signal warning.

You should take caution in interpreting a score that is based on a low review count.

We’re always looking for new topics that would be of interest to our customers in adding value to the analysis capability of the platform, so please let us know if you had ideas or requests for new topics.

For one-off analysis, we can do bespoke work on particular topics and deliver Employee Sentiment outputs off the platform.  Please get in touch with us if you’d like to request this info@deltabase.io.

All the of the tables and charts have Export buttons on the page.  So select this and for charts you can choose if to the get them as PDF or Excel CSV outputs.

Note that with the MS PowerPoint outputs they come in an ‘unformatted ‘look and feel, so you can copy and paste them into your own format decks where they will adopt the look and feel of your document, where that is defined in your file.

Select the Use Destination Theme & Embed Workbook option in MS PowerPoint:

In the Deep Dive section you can navigate across the tabs at the top of the section to cover Topic Deep Dives to see more details of the data on each topic, you can see the Ratings data, and finally explore the Review Extracts.

In the Review Extracts section you will find the Review Finder

Here you will find a sample of review extracts from the full set of data that Deltabase has used to score the topics.  You see 10 extracts (5 negative, 5 positive) for each topic, for each company in the peer set.

You can filter this list to see the topics and companies that you specifically want to see:

And you can use the Export Extracts button to extract to CSV the review extract data.  This export will reflect the filters in place on the data.  So remove any filters if you want to export all of the extracts.

At the top of the Review Extracts section of the Data Deep Dive you will find the full counts of reviews for each company in the peer set.

Yes. In the Data Deep Dive > Review Extracts > Review Finder section, filtering them as you desire, you can then use the Export Extracts button to export these in a CSV format.

In the Data Deep Dive > Review Extracts > Review Finder section, you can use the Add review filters button to filter the extracts as you desire to peruse or export.

You can filter the reviews by Positive or Negative, or by Topic.  If you wish to filter the company as well, then you can use the Company Filters at the top of the page.

Just hit the Apply button to put them into effect.  Use the Reset button to remove the filters.  The filters in place will be shown in the Filter section at the top of the table.

This is currently not shown in the front end but is available on request.  We are working on including this in the user interface in an upcoming change.

We currently only show data for the last complete year in the platform.  In 2025 we will show complete year data for 2024.  The reviews included in the analysis are all the reviews up to the capture data that pertain to the review years of 2019 – 2023.

Please get in touch via the Contact page on our website: https://deltabase.io/contact/ or email us at info@deltabase.io, or contact your Deltabase representative.