Glassdoor Employee Confidence Index: Stubbornly Unsteady
Daniel Zhao
Chief Economist at Glassdoor | Jun 4, 2024
Employee confidence fell in May, according to the latest data from the Glassdoor Employee Confidence Index. The share of employees reporting a positive 6-month business outlook fell to 46.4% in May 2024, reversing the uptick to 48.5% in April. Employee confidence continues to remain subdued with unsteady improvement in 2024 even as headlines of layoffs diminish.
One factor behind declining employee confidence over the last two years may be diminishing satisfaction with how senior leaders approach transparency and communication in the post-pandemic era. At the height of the pandemic, employees praised leaders for their transparency amidst a time of enormous uncertainty. In Glassdoor reviews, 63% of mentions of “transparency” were positive in April 2020, the highest at any point since 2016.
However, employee satisfaction with transparency has been steadily declining since then with only 40% of mentions of “transparency” being positive as of May 2024, even lower than the pre-pandemic period. After a period when leaders were more willing to be transparent, employees are even more dissatisfied with the return to pre-pandemic norms.
And this is uniquely important in times of economic turbulence. Transparency can help mitigate business fears and promote overall employee satisfaction, in particular with senior leadership. Unsurprisingly, only 6.8% of Glassdoor reviews with a negative business outlook rate overall employee satisfaction 4 or 5 stars, but this share rises to 25.1% when those reviews also mention “transparency” positively. By contrast, that share worsens when “transparency” is mentioned negatively, shrinking to 3.8%
Similarly, only 5.3% of Glassdoor reviews with a negative business outlook rate their senior management 4 or 5 stars, compared to 21% of those that mention “transparency” positively and just 2% of those that mention “transparency” negatively—a 10x difference. “Transparency” is an increasingly important quality of leadership post-pandemic, as also evidenced by employee feedback for Glassdoor’s Best-Led Companies of 2024 award winners.
We included some examples of reviews that highlight the importance of transparency below:
Employee Confidence by Industry
- Employee confidence in aerospace & defense fell 5.6 percentage points month-over-month in May and have fallen an even starker 7.7 percentage points over the year. Several major employers like Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin underwent layoffs earlier in 2024, which is now catching up to employee sentiment. Additionally, Boeing’s struggles are impacting employee confidence in the sector.
- Pharmaceutical & biotechnology has seen the largest decline in employee confidence over the last year (-10 percentage points). While big tech has dominated headlines of layoffs, pharma and biotech have also seen a wave of layoffs over the last year.
- Several other white-collar industries like financial services (+2.4 percentage points month-over-month), information technology (+0.6 pp), legal (+3.1 pp) and management consulting (+1.5 pp) saw modest improvements in employee confidence in May, which hopefully points to firming economic conditions in these sectors.
Glassdoor Employee Confidence Index by Industry
| Industry | May 2023 | Apr 2024 | May 2024 | MoM | YoY |
| Aerospace & Defense | 55.0% | 53.0% | 47.3% | -5.6% | -7.7% |
| Arts, Entertainment & Recreation | 42.2% | 41.9% | 41.9% | 0.0% | -0.3% |
| Construction, Repair & Maintenance Services | 59.3% | 56.2% | 56.7% | 0.5% | -2.6% |
| Education | 47.9% | 47.7% | 47.0% | -0.7% | -1.0% |
| Energy, Mining & Utilities | 58.3% | 52.4% | 51.7% | -0.7% | -6.5% |
| Financial Services | 54.5% | 50.2% | 52.6% | 2.4% | -1.9% |
| Government & Public Administration | 41.9% | 44.3% | 43.0% | -1.3% | 1.1% |
| Healthcare | 51.0% | 50.4% | 51.6% | 1.2% | 0.6% |
| Hotels & Travel Accommodation | 49.3% | 43.8% | 43.3% | -0.5% | -6.0% |
| Human Resources & Staffing | 62.0% | 56.3% | 57.2% | 0.9% | -4.8% |
| Information Technology | 54.2% | 52.4% | 53.0% | 0.6% | -1.2% |
| Insurance | 56.9% | 50.0% | 50.4% | 0.3% | -6.5% |
| Legal | 53.9% | 56.3% | 59.4% | 3.1% | 5.5% |
| Management & Consulting | 55.4% | 50.4% | 51.9% | 1.5% | -3.4% |
| Manufacturing | 48.8% | 44.4% | 44.3% | 0.0% | -4.5% |
| Media & Communication | 51.9% | 45.4% | 44.8% | -0.6% | -7.1% |
| Nonprofit & NGO | 50.1% | 46.7% | 46.3% | -0.4% | -3.8% |
| Personal Consumer Services | 43.3% | 38.9% | 43.1% | 4.2% | -0.2% |
| Pharmaceutical & Biotechnology | 49.1% | 40.8% | 39.1% | -1.7% | -10.0% |
| Real Estate | 59.5% | 54.1% | 55.7% | 1.6% | -3.9% |
| Restaurants & Food Service | 41.2% | 37.5% | 37.3% | -0.2% | -3.9% |
| Retail & Wholesale | 44.3% | 38.9% | 39.8% | 0.9% | -4.5% |
| Telecommunications | 49.9% | 44.6% | 43.7% | -1.0% | -6.2% |
| Transportation & Logistics | 50.4% | 44.9% | 45.8% | 0.9% | -4.6% |
Note: Industry-level data is the three-month trailing average of the index. MoM & YoY are percentage point changes.
Employee Confidence by Seniority
While entry-level employee confidence was largely unchanged in May, it has seen the largest decline over the last year, falling 4.5 percentage points over the year, compared to smaller declines for mid senior level (-3 pp) and director plus (-0.9 pp) employees. As the Class of 2024 graduates, they face a job market with cautious hiring which crimps opportunities for new entrants to the workforce, despite the historically low unemployment headlining the job market.
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 May 2024 is current as of May 19, 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.
