What do part-time employees in Japanese chain restaurants talk about when dissatisfied? Applying Structural Topic Modeling to employee reviews

While part-time employees constitute the primary workforce in the chain restaurant industry, their retention has become crucial in developed countries, especially Japan, due to labor shortages resulting from the declining birthrate and aging population. Analyzing employee reviews is an effective method for understanding factors that decrease employee satisfaction. However, while many analyses are focusing on full-time employees, there is insufficient analysis focusing on part-time employees, whose employment status and motivations differ from those of full-time employees. This study employs a Structural Topic Model to correlate latent topics from 4511 online text reviews with a 5-point scale of part-time employee satisfaction scores in Japanese chain restaurants. The study identifies 20 topics, including management systems and key employee interests. Especially digital communication and interview processes frequently appeared when satisfaction was low, which are unique to part-time employees in chain restaurants and had been overlooked in previous analyses. Further analysis links 20 topics to four 5-point scale HRM metrics (compensation satisfaction, workplace environment, motivation, and interpersonal relationships), enabling deeper analysis of the relationships between topics and HRM metrics. These insights contribute to the development of strategies to enhance part-time employee satisfaction in chain restaurants.