Your Employees Are Already Telling the World How It Feels to Work for You

New research by Welliba, which spanned every S&P 500 company, finds that 25 million public data points paint a clear picture of employee experience without the need for annual or frequent surveys.

Every year, HR teams spend weeks crafting employee surveys, chasing completion rates, waiting for results and debating what the numbers mean. All of this work is based on an incorrect assumption that you need to ask employees how they feel. They already share what they think every day. A Glassdoor review cluster. A Reddit thread spike. A wave of negative LinkedIn mentions.

New research by Welliba suggests that what employees are already sharing isn’t just more honest than a survey response, it’s more predictive. An analysis of 25 million public data points across every S&P 500 company found that organizations in the top 100 for employee experience delivered 5% higher total shareholder returns over five years than the rest of the index. That’s not a rounding error. That’s trillions of dollars in shareholder value directly tied to how it feels to work somewhere.

The implication is uncomfortable for HR teams that have spent years designing surveys, chasing completion rates and debating what the numbers mean. The data wasn't locked inside your organization waiting to be asked for. It was already out there. The question is whether you are listening.

What 25 Million Data Points Reveal

In 2025, Welliba's AI-powered platform scoured data from more than 150,000 publicly available sources: Glassdoor, Reddit, LinkedIn, professional forums, industry communities and news outlets. Every S&P 500 company. No surveys issued, no consent forms necessary, no HR processes interrupted.

The employees had already done the talking. All Welliba did was show up to listen.

For boards and CFOs who've spent years asking HR to connect people investment to financial outcomes, this is the answer,  and it came from publicly available data the whole time. The performance gap that emerged was unambiguous. The challenge for people leaders is whether to stick with the survey processes they already know or meet people where they are. It turns out there are real benefits to listening rather than asking.

The Problem With Asking

The survey ritual isn't broken because HR teams are doing it wrong. It's broken by design.

First, it's slow. By the time a survey is designed, deployed, completed, analyzed and reported, the conditions that prompted it have already shifted. The data is historical the moment it reaches a decision-maker.

Second, it's incomplete. The employees most disengaged — the ones whose signal matters most — are the least likely to participate. Every survey has a systematic blind spot baked in.

Third, and most damaging: asking creates expectations. When employees fill out a survey, they expect something to change. When nothing visible does, trust erodes. Some organizations have discovered, painfully, that running a survey and responding inadequately is worse than not asking at all.

External signals sidestep all three problems. They're continuous, unfiltered and generated without any request from the employer. The employee posting a candid review at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday isn't filling in a corporate form. They're not performing for HR. They're just telling the truth, and they've been doing it for years.

What Actually Drives (and Kills) EX

The S&P 500 study does more than confirm a performance gap. It reveals the structure of the employee experience at scale, with findings that challenge several widely held assumptions.

The most consistent drivers of positive employee experience across the index are not perks, pay or benefits programs. They are human relationships. In 66% of S&P 500 companies, relationships with colleagues are a positive factor. Direct manager relationships appear as a booster in 62% of firms. These findings hold across industries, geographies and company sizes.

The implication is significant. Organizations that invest heavily in complex engagement programs while neglecting the day-to-day quality of human interactions at work are, in effect, optimizing the wrong variables.

On the blocker side, the data tells an equally important story. Bottom-up communication, the degree to which employees feel they can speak up and be heard, is the most common negative factor, appearing in 56% of low-experience companies. But no other single blocker appears in more than 29% of companies across the full index. EX failure, in other words, is highly contextual. There is no universal fix because there is no universal problem.

Four Organizational Profiles, Four Different Challenges

Not all EX gaps look the same. When Welliba mapped all 500 companies across two dimensions — employee experience score and five-year growth performance — four distinct profiles emerged. Each one tells a different story about where the risk is hiding.

• Powerhouses have cracked the code. High EX, high growth, strong alignment between what employees feel and what the business is doing. Work content, communication and human relationships are all pulling in the same direction. These companies aren't just performing well — they're performing sustainably.

• Unhappy Performers are the most interesting and most dangerous profile. The growth numbers look great from the outside. But employees are being left behind as the company scales. Rewards aren't keeping pace, career development is an afterthought, and the internal signals are flashing amber. The external story is compelling. The internal one isn't.

• Sleeping Giants are sitting on untapped potential. The cultural foundations are solid — strong career signals, healthy retention and employees who aren't looking to leave. But that goodwill hasn't converted into growth performance yet. The opportunity is real. The question is whether leadership sees it before a competitor does.

• Stragglers are struggling on both dimensions, but they're not necessarily stuck. Poor role design and broken communication channels are common patterns and, crucially, they're identifiable and often discrete. There's no universal fix, but there's usually a specific lever. These organizations frequently have more accessible improvement paths than their overall performance suggests.

Three Takeaways for HR Leaders

For HR leaders navigating increasing pressure to demonstrate the business value of people investment, there are three direct implications.

1. External EX intelligence can serve as a continuous signal rather than a periodic audit. Rather than waiting for the next survey cycle, leaders can access a real-time view of how the organization is perceived as a place to work and how that perception compares to direct competitors.

2. Benchmarking against peers changes the quality of strategic decisions. Knowing your own EX score in isolation tells you relatively little. Knowing that your score places you in the bottom quartile of your sector, or that a key competitor has improved significantly in the past 12 months, creates a different and more urgent conversation.

3. The research reinforces that EX strategy should be precision-led, not universal. The data identifies specific blockers and boosters for each organization. Generic culture programs applied across the board are rarely the answer. The question is not "how do we improve employee experience?" It is "which two or three factors, if addressed, would move our organization from one performance profile to another?"

The Conversation Has Changed

For decades, the challenge facing HR has been proving that employee experience matters to business outcomes. That argument is no longer theoretical.

But it's worth being clear about what external data is — and what it isn't. It skews toward employees motivated to share. The loudest voices on Glassdoor aren't always the most representative ones. Platform coverage varies by industry and company size. And no algorithm, however sophisticated, fully replaces the texture of a well-run focus group or the candor of a one-on-one conversation.

Welliba isn't claiming otherwise. What external signals offer isn't perfection — it's continuity. A real-time read on how your organization is perceived as a place to work, updated constantly, without asking anyone to fill out a form.

The question has shifted. It's no longer whether employee experience drives business performance — a large-scale analysis of the full S&P 500 has put that to rest. The question is whether your organization is measuring it with instruments sharp enough to act on, or whether you're still waiting six months for survey results that tell you what your employees posted on Reddit in January.

Your employees are already telling the world how it feels to work for you. The only remaining question is whether you are listening.

About the Author

---

Jake Mealy is Chief Data Solutions Officer at Welliba, where he leads the analytical work behind the company's S&P 500 employee experience research. A PhD in Bioengineering from Trinity College Dublin, with prior roles at Indeed and Analytic Partners, Jake has spent his career translating large, complex data sets into decisions that actually change how organizations operate.