What Do Employees Want in a Post-Pandemic World? A Landmark Study Uses Leximancer to Find Out
"Evolution of Employee Work Preferences Amidst COVID‐19: A Social Media Analysis"
Published in Human Resource Management Journal (2025)
By Ashish Malik, Mohan Thite, Dian Tjondronegoro, Ramanathan Iyer, Fereshteh Nayyeri, Behnaz Avazpour, Iva Durakovic, Samin Marzban, and Christhina Candido
https://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12610
In the wake of COVID-19, much of the conversation around work has focused on flexibility, burnout, and shifting expectations. But beyond the headlines, what do employees themselves actually value in their work - and how have those preferences evolved since 2019?
A recent publication in the Human Resource Management Journal sheds light on this very question. Led by Professor Ashish Malik and colleagues from leading Australian universities, the study offers a large-scale, text-based analysis of employee reviews from Glassdoor, using Leximancer as the core tool to reveal shifting work preferences over time.
Mining the Voice of the Employee
The researchers analysed over 14,000 employee reviews from a global technology company, spanning pre-pandemic, pandemic, and post-pandemic periods. To uncover meaningful insights from such a large and unstructured dataset, they turned to Leximancer - leveraging its semantic clustering and concept mapping to make sense of what mattered most to employees across time.
Their findings revealed not just what employees were saying, but how those priorities changed in response to a global crisis.
A New Methodology for a New World of Work
Led by Professor Ashish Malik (UNSW Canberra) and an interdisciplinary team of scholars from Griffith University, the University of Melbourne, UNSW, and the University of Wollongong, this project exemplifies methodological innovation in HRM research.
Rather than relying solely on surveys or small-scale interviews, the authors adopted a two-stage, mixed-methods approach powered by Leximancer:
Stage One: Leximancer was used to generate broad concept maps from thousands of employee review texts, offering a ‘zoomed-out’ view of thematic relationships across time.
Stage Two: The team then ‘zoomed in’ on specific concepts such as compensation, work-life balance, and support - triangulating these with star ratings and structured feedback to validate emerging patterns.
This combination of scale and nuance would have been impossible using manual coding alone. As the authors note, Leximancer allowed them to preserve the subjectivity of employee voice while extracting stable, reproducible themes. A perfect fit for large-scale qualitative inquiry.
“Leximancer offered a semi-automated, two-step analysis approach… allowing for a comparative analysis of organisational ratings and qualitative employee responses.”
— Malik et al., 2025
Key Findings: From Pay to Purpose, and Culture to Care
So, what changed?
Before COVID, employees associated high organisational ratings with compensation and benefits. The traditional drivers of satisfaction.
During the pandemic, those links weakened. Instead, themes like team support, empathetic leadership, and learning opportunities came to the fore.
Post-pandemic, the strongest predictors of employee satisfaction were work-life balance, career growth, and a supportive culture… indicating a shift from extrinsic rewards to intrinsic values.
These shifts were clearly visible in the Leximancer concept maps, which showed how employee priorities physically moved across thematic clusters over time. Concepts like “friendly,” “supportive,” “growth,” and “flexibility” became more central post-COVID, displacing earlier emphases on structure and efficiency.
The study’s framing using Self-Determination Theory and the AMO framework (Ability, Motivation, Opportunity) provides a compelling theoretical underpinning. In short, when employees can meet their psychological needs… autonomy, competence, and relatedness… they are more likely to thrive. And when organisations support those needs through flexible, motivational, and skill-enhancing HR practices, performance follows.
What This Means for HR, Researchers, and Organisations
This paper is a standout example of how employee voice data (when analysed at scale with the right tools) can provide real, actionable insights into workplace dynamics. It also shows that employee preferences are not static. They evolve in response to context, crisis, and culture.
It demonstrates not only the power of employee-generated content for informing HR policy, but also the unique strengths of Leximancer in capturing structural shifts in sentiment and meaning over time.
By combining theoretical depth with methodological innovation, Malik et al. (2025) have set a high bar for future work in talent management, workplace analytics, and employee experience design. We are proud that Leximancer supported this important work and congratulate the entire research team for their thoughtful and impactful contribution.
Full Citation:
Malik, A., Thite, M., Tjondronegoro, D., Iyer, R., Nayyeri, F., Avazpour, B., Durakovic, I., Marzban, S., & Candido, C. (2025). Evolution of Employee Work Preferences Amidst COVID‐19: A Social Media Analysis. Human Resource Management Journal. https://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12610
