New ONS study with glass.ai data. Investigating the link between management practices and high growth companies.

In January 2019, the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) published a study which aimed to understand the characteristics of high growth companies using non-traditional data sources. Using data read by glass.ai with its web-scale natural language understanding technology, the initial study showed that the term “management” seems to be more likely to be used by high-growth companies in descriptions, news articles, bios and job adverts on their websites.

Summary of main words used by high-growth companies for different free text collected from their websites

This raised the question of whether high-growth companies use specific or structured management approaches. In an update to the research, the ONS has explored whether this characteristic could be confirmed via the survey results contained in the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Management and Expectations Survey (MES) dataset.

They explored the relationship between management practices given in the answers to the MES questions and the high-growth companies in the original study. This included questions referring to education, targets, training days, performance management and bonuses, and the basis for promotion. Questions relating to business characteristics, targets and employment practices showed the biggest differences, whereas questions regarding key performance indicators and production delivery showed the smallest.

Type of employee given a performance bonus

Based on this new investigation the link between high growth companies and management practices highlighted by the original textual analysis of the company websites seems to be highly likely — demonstrating further the potential of deep reading and understanding of web content for use in economic analysis.

The updated report is available here.