The latest 2016 Empathy Global Index has nine Indian companies at the bottom of the pile holding positions from 140 to 150.
It is no surprise that Silicon Valley giants Facebook and Alphabet — the parent company of Google — top the list as the most empathetic, followed by many others who have their head quarters in California.
Leading the list of least empathetic companies are Bharat Petroleum followed by Sun Pharma and ICICI Bank.
The top ten list also has Bharti Airtel, Larsen & Toubro and Indian Oil, while State Bank of India is placed at 11 and Reliance Industries at 13. Interestingly, last year there were no Indian companies in at the bottom end of the list.
The index claimed they define empathy “through a company’s ethics, leadership, internal culture, brand perception and public messaging via social media”.
The index also uses publicly available metrics like “CEO approval ratings amongst staff, ratio of women on boards, number of accounting infractions and scandals”.
For the 2016 index a carbon metric has also been added, while analysing two million tweets between September 27 and October 16, 2016.
The survey has also been expanded to include a sample of Young Global Leaders from The World Economic Forum who were asked to rate the companies on a moral basis.
“We used a genetic algorithm to ensure that the index remains consistent with previous published indexes, despite the changing composition of our data-sources and the broadening scope of our index,” said a post announcing the index. The post said financial information came from S&P Capital IQ & the employee information from Glassdoor.
