One often discussed topic is the culture inside a company. Most managers talk about it and almost always talk it up. But it's a hard thing to assess in my experience unless you know people well on the inside or deal directly with the business yourself.

Done well, amazing culture (that's right for that particular business/industry) can be a solid moat or competitive advantage in my view. Done badly and companies often go belly up.

The Gallup Engagement Survey and Best Place to Work are worth looking at. What's noteworthy is that the average across most businesses is pretty poor. About one third of staff are actively engaged - that means they have drunk the kool aid and are really committed to the company and the strategy. Another third are on the fence - they don't go the extra mile so to speak but equally aren't intentionally doing a crap job. The last third don't care at all and are hurting the business and the customers in small ways every day. Another way to think about it is if there's a piece of paper scrunched up on the floor of the office. The best third will pick it up and put it in the bin. The middle third will walk past it. The bottom third are the ones who put it there!

So, I have found using glassdoor.com.au helpful in getting a larger scale take on employee feedback. It's the biggest employee review site in the world and is free to use and add reviews to. Once you have signed up for a basic free account by answering a few simple questions, you can enter any company name in the world into the company section and you will get a detailed look at all the employee reviews they have to date.

It's not perfect and the less reviews, the less helpful it probably is. The average is around 3.5 out of 5, once there is a decent number of reviews. Under 3.0 and you probably have a crappy culture/management and disengaged team. At 4.0 and above your probably have a great culture and really committed team.

Plenty of other things to consider of course but if you are going to own a small piece of a company for hopefully years to come, whether most of your employees are happy and productive is well worth factoring in as far as I'm concerned.

As an example, I had long thought Jumbo Interactive had a great culture and they had presented that in their annual reports for years. So, was happy when checking glassdoor, that seems to be true -