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Employee confidence in their employer is lowest at companies including Starbucks, Pacific Union, a study of Glassdoor reviews for 106 of America’s biggest businesses has found.
The analysis, conducted by Switch On Business, examined 198,617 Glassdoor, calculating the percentage of employees who rated the business outlook of their employer as ‘positive.’
According to the findings, the future is looking particularly bleak at Union Pacific Corporation (UNP), with just 27.17% of reviews giving a positive rating.
Lance Fritz, Union Pacific’s former CEO stepped down in 2023 after hedge fund Soroban Capital Partners pushed for his exit in a letter that cited “years of persistent operating underperformance,” and that UNP was “rated by employees as the worst place to work and has the lowest employee CEO approval rating (ranked 500th out of 500 in both).”
The other employers with the unfortunate (dis)honor of making the bottom ten are Fiserv (39.56%), CVS Health (41.17%), Walmart (44.54%), Wells Fargo (45.31%), McDonald’s (46.93%), AT&T (47.66%), Starbucks (48.00%), Lowe’s (48.60%), and Meta (49.53%).
While Meta is still in the bottom ten, the tech giant does top the list for the best year-on-year improvement, with an 18.16% increase in employees rating business outlook as positive, as it feels the effects of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “Year of Efficiency” and his investment in AI product development.
Large employers including Mastercard (+5.72%), JP Morgan (+5.77%, and Salesforce (+6.15%), have also seen a notable jump in employee confidence.
Businesses that have seen the biggest decrease in employee confidence include Coca-Cola (-12.33%), Pfizer (-20.02%), and Charles Schwab (-22.44%). Dell has also suffered a 16.33% drop in employee confidence amid an unpopular return-to-office push.
A state-by-state view makes uncomfortable reading for Uber and CVS Health. In both New Jersey and Missouri, Uber has a confidence rating of just 18%, and CVS Health has the unwanted record of scoring the lowest confidence rating in the highest number of states (Alabama, Hawaii, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, and Oklahoma.)
It’s a better outlook for companies including Lockheed Martin, Service Now, ConocoPhillips, Visa, Cisco, Intuit, Progressive, and Abbvie, who all scored a 100% employee confidence rating in individual states.
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John Deere scored an impressive outlook rating of 78% in Iowa, despite the recent confirmation of 310 further job cuts at facilities in the state as the company shifts production to Mexico.
Employees at Intuit (87.33%) and ConocoPhillips (92.31%) are particularly positive about their company’s outlook, making it into the top ten companies where employee confidence across the US is highest.
Nvidia, which has become worth nearly three trillion dollars amid the AI revolutions, tops the list with a 92.67% confidence rating. Prologis (90.14%), Vertex Pharmaceuticals (89.03%), Service Now (88.97%), Intuitive Surgical (87.44%), Mastercard (87.36%), Adobe (87.33%), and Cadence Design Systems (86.08%) make up the remainder of the top ten.
Previous studies have shown that more happy and confident employees can drive business performance.
Low optimism can also hamper an employer’s ability to recruit and retain talent, with studies finding the majority of US job candidates will avoid joining a company with negative online reviews.
