Than you for this critique! I’m about to read your ESG piece next, but in the meanwhile, wonder if the “100 best companies to work for” thing also suffers from lack of causal robustness? In fact, most economic or financial issues tend to be quite impossible to study from observational data, because of the huge correlations between all the variables. E.g., for 100 best companies, they probably (hypothesis) benefit from some positive “virtuous cycles” of attracting the best talent, therefore investing the most attractive in long term stuff, therefore attracting large diversified investor bases, therefore making more money, therefore attracting the best talent, etc etc — so that over time, what has been embedded into the corporations’ “DNA” (such as cultural norms) is fairly difficult to replicate and (if it is the “right” DNA) also highly beneficial for both shareholders and employees. Would be interested to know if you know of a meta-study that looks at a larger sample of businesses and the degree to which employee satisfaction, engagement, happiness, or other similar variable can be shown to either correlate with or “cause” improved performance (ideally over long period of time, or perhaps in economic value added terms). [Note: I’ve been arguing, using your paper, that there is at least a correlation and possibly a causation, because I “want to believe” it — but am fully aware that that doesn’t make it so. On the other hand, I feel I’m doing fairly little damage if some people take on board my advice to be kinder and more “human” in how they run their businesses, even if that advice were to be wrong. [Again, I don’t think it is, but don’t claim to have proven it isn’t.] Health warning re: article at link: it probably contains a ton of causal language that is questionable — but it’s the only way to write a decently readable article for the audience we were aiming for: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-boss-factor-making-the-world-a-better-place-through-workplace-relationships]
