Glassdoor Employee Confidence Index: Confidence Chills in February
Daniel Zhao
Chief Economist at Glassdoor | Mar 4, 2024
Employee confidence plumbed new depths in February, according to the latest data from the Glassdoor Employee Confidence Index. The share of employees reporting a positive 6-month business outlook fell to 45.1% in February 2024, down from 45.7% in January and hitting another fresh low since our data began in 2016. Despite other improving economic indicators, employees remain skeptical about their employers’ business prospects.
Layoffs in the headlines are grabbing the attention of employees. Tech and media layoffs have gripped headlines and unsurprisingly, those are also the sectors where layoff discussions have been most prominent. Mentions of layoffs in Glassdoor reviews from tech employees are up 12% in February 2024 compared to a year prior in February 2023 and similarly up 25% for media. However, the wave of layoffs in 2023 mutes that increase; over the last two years, mentions of layoffs in tech employee reviews have increased more than four-fold (358% or 4.6 times) and in media, more than triple (214% or 3.1 times).
More surprisingly, discussions of layoffs in tech are actually higher in February 2024 than even during the worst of the pandemic. Measurably, layoffs (even in tech or media) are not as deep as they were during the pandemic, so why is discussion so widespread?
We can get a hint from two data points.
Firstly, former employees who mention layoffs in their reviews—likely, these are laid off employees—rate their employers’ business outlook positively only 10% of the time. By contrast, current employees who mention layoffs—these are likely employees who “survived” a round of layoffs”—rate their employers’ business outlook positively 20% of the time, but crucially, this number has fallen from 25% a year ago.
This suggests that even employees who were not laid off are becoming increasingly pessimistic about their employers’ prospects whether because of their opinions of the overall economy or their direct experience with anxiety, lower morale or burnout after a round of layoffs.
Secondly, even employees who don’t mention layoffs have seen a decline in business outlook, so the employee confidence decline is not purely a result of anxious employees in a select few companies or industries undergoing layoffs dragging down the measure for the rest of the economy.
Employee Confidence by Industry
- Employee confidence in Information Technology (-7.1pp) and Media & Communication (-7.2pp) has fallen at similar clips over the last year as both industries have been hit by another wave of layoff announcements in the last two months.
- Professional services industries like Management & Consulting (-8.9pp), Legal (-7.0pp), Financial Services (-7.9pp) and Insurance (-8.0pp) have seen sharp declines in employee confidence over the last year as the slowdown in the job market has hit traditionally white collar industries.
Glassdoor Employee Confidence Index by Industry*
| Industry | Feb 2023 | Jan 2024 | Feb 2024 | MoM | YoY |
| Aerospace & Defense | 63.8% | 54.8% | 55.5% | 0.7% | -8.2% |
| Arts, Entertainment & Recreation | 47.9% | 40.6% | 40.3% | -0.2% | -7.5% |
| Construction, Repair & Maintenance Services | 60.3% | 55.8% | 55.2% | -0.6% | -5.1% |
| Education | 50.5% | 44.0% | 46.0% | 2.0% | -4.4% |
| Energy, Mining & Utilities | 60.6% | 52.8% | 54.1% | 1.3% | -6.5% |
| Financial Services | 57.4% | 50.1% | 49.5% | -0.7% | -7.9% |
| Government & Public Administration | 46.0% | 44.9% | 45.3% | 0.3% | -0.8% |
| Healthcare | 51.9% | 47.1% | 46.7% | -0.4% | -5.2% |
| Hotels & Travel Accommodation | 52.0% | 49.2% | 46.1% | -3.1% | -5.9% |
| Human Resources & Staffing | 65.0% | 54.5% | 52.8% | -1.7% | -12.2% |
| Information Technology | 57.2% | 49.7% | 50.1% | 0.4% | -7.1% |
| Insurance | 56.0% | 49.2% | 48.1% | -1.2% | -8.0% |
| Legal | 59.7% | 52.3% | 52.7% | 0.5% | -7.0% |
| Management & Consulting | 57.9% | 51.0% | 49.0% | -2.0% | -8.9% |
| Manufacturing | 50.9% | 45.8% | 44.7% | -1.1% | -6.2% |
| Media & Communication | 52.7% | 45.6% | 45.5% | -0.1% | -7.2% |
| Nonprofit & NGO | 49.1% | 47.8% | 47.8% | 0.0% | -1.3% |
| Personal Consumer Services | 46.4% | 39.2% | 36.2% | -3.0% | -10.2% |
| Pharmaceutical & Biotechnology | 48.4% | 42.1% | 41.2% | -0.9% | -7.2% |
| Real Estate | 58.2% | 54.0% | 53.5% | -0.5% | -4.7% |
| Restaurants & Food Service | 42.3% | 37.5% | 36.5% | -1.0% | -5.8% |
| Retail & Wholesale | 45.2% | 39.3% | 39.0% | -0.3% | -6.2% |
| Telecommunications | 51.3% | 39.2% | 40.9% | 1.8% | -10.4% |
| Transportation & Logistics | 53.7% | 43.7% | 43.3% | -0.4% | -10.4% |
Note: Industry-level data is the three-month trailing average of the index. MoM & YoY are percentage point changes.
Employee Confidence by Seniority
Employee confidence continues to drop most severely for mid-level employees for whom employee confidence has fallen 6.3 percentage points from 54.6% in February 2023 to 48.3% in February 2024. As the “year of efficiency” mandates extend into 2024, middle managers are under more pressure to do more with less, managing demands from leaders while placating anxious employees.
Methodology
The Glassdoor Employee Confidence Index is a new report that provides a real-time pulse on the economy from the lens of employees. As one of the world’s leading sites for insights on jobs and companies, Glassdoor collects tens of thousands of employee ratings of their employers’ six-month business outlook (rated as “positive”, “neutral” or “negative”) each month.
The index is the share of U.S. full-time and part-time employees who report a positive six-month business outlook for their employer. The index is reweighted to account for changes in the platform and by industry to match a nationally representative mix of employee ratings by industry. Data presented at the industry and seniority level are three-month trailing averages.
Data on the use of terms and phrases in Glassdoor reviews is not reweighted. Term usage is normalized by the total number of reviews in the month.
Data for February 2024 is current as of February 25, 2024. In subsequent updates, we will revise partial or preliminary data from previous months.
To read more about the Glassdoor Employee Confidence Index, please read our launch paper.
Daniel Zhao
Daniel Zhao is Chief Economist at Glassdoor. On Glassdoor's Economic Research team, he has conducted research using Glassdoor's unique data on a variety of topics affecting job seekers and employers ranging from the health of the job market to pay transparency to employee engagement & retention. His work has been cited in publications like the New York Times, the Harvard Business Review and more. Prior to joining the Economic Research team, he also worked on improving the user experience for Glassdoor’s consumer jobs product and mobile app. He holds a bachelor's degree in applied mathematics and economics from Harvard College.
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