“How’s business?”
It’s a common question, but the answer is usually far from simple. And even from within the same company, perspectives are likely to differ.
The boss tries to convey a sense of hope and purpose even during a round of layoffs, while those who escape redundancy are likely to feel less productive and less confident in their company’s product and customer service. Frontline employees may trust the information they get from their direct supervisors more than what they hear through corporate channels. But those frontliners themselves are a source of “reliable information on what is really going on in the company and in the industry,” according to Harvard Business School.
Overall, employee confidence is at a record low, with even giants such as Meta and Tesla cutting jobs amidst the new economic and technological outlook — and following a period of corporate overconfidence. So, how do the workers at these and other big U.S. companies truly feel about their employers’ business prospects? Switch On Business analyzed the latest company confidence ratings on Glassdoor to find out.
About This Analysis
We analyzed recent Glassdoor reviews for over 100 of America’s biggest companies to calculate the percentage of employees who rated their employer’s business outlook as positive. We also uncovered which businesses have seen the largest year-on-year increase and decrease in employee confidence.
Insights
- NVIDIA has the highest employee confidence, with 92.67% of employees rating their business outlook as positive.
- Meta Platforms (Facebook) employee confidence has risen the most in the past year (+18.16%).
- Only 18% of Uber employees in Missouri and New Jersey rate the company’s outlook as positive — the joint lowest confidence in a big company in a particular state.
- Meta, Amazon and Netflix are among the ten tech companies where employee confidence is at its lowest.
The U.S. Companies Where Employee Confidence Is Highest and Lowest
We found three companies with a greater than 90% confidence rating from their employees: NVIDIA (92.67%), ConocoPhillips (92.31%) and Prologis (90.14%).
NVIDIA is one of the big behind-the-scenes companies of the present AI boom, first producing chips to power video games and now giving oomph to services such as ChatGPT. Valued at over $2 trillion, NVIDIA is worth more than Google or Amazon, with young career makers looking to secure an internship and NVIDIA shares at the same moment.
Real estate investment trust Prologis is on the confidence ascendant: the company with the third most positive employees is also in the top ten for the largest increase in confidence (+7.16%) year-on-year. Employees value Prologis’ ESG (environmental, social and governance) record, and the company completed a $26 billion merger with Duke Realty Corporation, signaling a healthy outlook to employees and investors alike.
At the other end of the confidence spectrum, one company stands apart with significantly lower employee confidence levels than any other firm. Just 27.17% of employees of the Union Pacific Corporation (UNP) reckon the railroad company has a positive business outlook, while at the second worst rated, fintech’s Fiserv, 39.56% of employees are confident about how it’s going.
Union Pacific replaced its CEO in 2023 following pressure from hedge fund Soroban Capital Partners, who alleged that outgoing boss Lance Fritz had “lost the confidence of shareholders, employees, customers, and regulators.” However, his replacement, Jim Vena, apparently has a challenge ahead of him.
“Over the last fifteen years railroads have revived themselves with innovation in scheduling, technology, and customer focus on carbon emissions,” reports investment management firm Cooper Investors. “But inertia is difficult to shake, and UNP has lagged its rail peers in service and growth for over a decade.”
The U.S. Companies Where Employee Confidence Has Improved and Fallen the Most
Meta Platforms (Facebook) has enjoyed improved employee confidence (+18.16% year-on-year) at nearly twice the rate of the second most improved company, Cadence Design Systems (+9.80%). This comes at the tail end of Mark Zuckerberg’s famed “Year of Efficiency,” which he told employees would “make us a better technology company” and “ improve our financial performance in a difficult environment so we can execute our long term vision.”
Across that year, profits have risen even if Meta stock has now slumped following Zuckerberg’s stated ambition to recommence spending against future profits on AI tools and features — or, as he puts it, “grow[ing] our investment envelope meaningfully before we make much revenue from some of these new products.”
Charles Schwab (-22.44%), QUALCOMM (-20.41%) and Pfizer (-20.02%) have suffered the largest drops in employee confidence this year. Pfizer has implemented a $4 billion cost-cutting plan and hired a chief strategy and innovation officer to mitigate expiring patents and declining profits. However, employees on Glassdoor suggest that the company is too big and old-fashioned to adapt to a changing landscape.
The Company in Each State Where Employee Confidence is Highest and Lowest
Many of the biggest businesses in America hire across multiple states. But, employee confidence in these businesses differs by location.
We found nine states where one of the top companies has a 100% confidence rating from its employees. For example, 100% of fintech firm Intuit’s North Carolina employees are positive about the company’s business outlook, but that figure is reduced to 94% in New York, 91% in Ohio, 88% in Idaho and just 80% in South Carolina, although it is the company with the highest employee confidence levels in each of these states.
Agricultural manufacturer John Deere is Iowa’s top-performing business from the point of view of local employees. Some 78% reckon the firm has a positive business outlook. The company established a People Strategy in 2023, aimed at “inspiring and engaging our employees, building our global talent pipeline, refreshing our culture, and ensuring we have the data, technology, and insights to effectively manage and develop our global workforce.”
Uber and Walmart are the companies where employee confidence is lowest in five states each. Still, CVS Health eclipses this record by scoring lowest in eight states, including New York (33%), Maryland (22%) and Hawaii (40%). In 2025, the company’s first-quarter revenue and adjusted earnings fell short of expectations, with medical costs rising as patients attended procedures delayed by the pandemic. CVS Health has now reduced its annual projection for 2024.
Uber has the lowest employee confidence levels in Missouri (18%), New Jersey (18%), Virginia (27%), Colorado (28%) and Nevada (30%). The ride-hailing behemoth also has the fifth lowest confidence levels across the tech giants (see below) at a nationwide level of 55.74%. The company just enjoyed its first profitable year, but this comes at the tail end of both a driver and rider shortage — and drivers remain unhappy with low wage levels and poor pay transparency.
The U.S. Tech Giants Where Employee Confidence is Highest and Lowest
NVIDIA has the most positive business outlook of the tech giants, according to its employees, amid the AI boom and increased demand for chip supply and innovation.
The tech giant with the second highest employee confidence levels is also into AI — and is doing it with NVIDIA. Some 88.97% of employees at ServiceNow rate the firm’s business outlook as positive, with the confidence increasing following the announcement they would partner with NVIDIA “to develop powerful, enterprise-grade generative AI capabilities that can transform business processes with faster, more intelligent workflow automation.”
Fintech giant Fiserv (39.56%) stands apart with significantly lower employee confidence levels than the big-name brands that follow it — Meta (49.53%), Intel (54.35%), Amazon (54.67%) and Uber (55.74%). Glassdoor reviewers flag issues with Fiserv’s management structure and bureaucracy holding back the potential of the employees and, by implication, the business.
The U.S. Tech Giants Where Employee Confidence Has Improved and Fallen the Most
Employee confidence has risen most dramatically in the last year at Meta (+18.16% year on year) as the company bounces back from layoffs, austerity and the misstep into the metaverse (see The U.S. Companies Where Employee Confidence Has Improved and Fallen the Most, above).
The company with the second-best improvement is Cadence Design Systems (+9.80%), a hardware and software firm that specializes in AI and chip design. Cadence counts Intel and NVIDIA among its big-name customers.
Two IT companies trail IT-adjacent telecoms and semiconductors firm QUALCOMM (-20.41%) among the tech giants where employee confidence has fallen the most.
Dell (-16.33%) is coming off a slow year after infrastructure sales were hit by “macroeconomic, geopolitical and interest rate” conditions, leading to thousands of redundancies. In response, Dell’s “operating margin rate improved as we delivered higher gross margins with disciplined operating expense management,” claims Dell COO Jeff Clarke.
But IBM (-10.39%), the big tech company with the third greatest fall in employee confidence, is actually flourishing amid the AI boom — small consolation for the 1.5% of its workforce that they laid off at the start of 2023.
Human Values, Business Matters
As the IBM example demonstrates, sometimes employees see a company’s business outlook more through the eyes of the HR environment than through the books. Indeed, Glassdoor explains that the general fall in employee confidence may partly be due to a sharp drop in hiring over the past year.
“Hiring is one of the most visible indicators that employees have of a company’s business performance,” explains Glassdoor’s Daniel Zhao. “Aggressive hiring plans signal leaderships’ confidence in the company’s growth potential and often tangibly provides more opportunities for existing employees to grow their careers. Conversely, hiring freezes signal that leaders are worried and can block opportunities for promotion or growth.”
Of course, it works both ways: studies show that a company with employees who feel positive and secure is likely to perform better. This is just another reason why, if you want to know “how’s business,” you should look to the employees.
Methodology
We started with a seed list of 106 U.S. companies and a second seed list of 36 U.S. tech giants with the largest market capitalization, according to CompaniesMarketCap.com.
We then obtained the most recent two years of Glassdoor reviews for each company to discover what percentage of employees rated the business outlook of their employer as positive and which saw the largest year-on-year increase and decrease in the percentage of employees rating their business outlook as positive.
These results were broken down for all companies, for the tech giants and for whichever company ranked highest and lowest on employee confidence in each U.S. state.
This study includes 198,617 reviews on Glassdoor.com and was completed in April 2024.
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