Glassdoor launches employee confidence index

Glassdoor collects ratings and reviews from employees. Reviewers rate their overall job satisfaction with a company and can rate various factors including culture and values or senior leadership.

The Glassdoor Employee Confidence Index calculates an aggregate of the share of employees who have a positive view of their employer’s business performance over the next six months. 

Reviewers can rate their employers on their ‘6-month business outlook’, with three response options: ‘positive’, ‘neutral’ and ‘negative’.

The index fell by 5.8 percentage points year-on-year, from 53.4% in July 2022 to 47.6% in July 2023, according to Glassdoor. Of the job sectors studied, confidence was highest in the construction industry, with 61.2% of employees reporting a positive business outlook, while the information sector saw the biggest drop in confidence, falling to 48.6% in the past 12 months.

Employee confidence for mid-senior level employees declined by 6.2 percentage points year-over-year, according to the July index. For directors and executives, and entry-level employees, employee confidence has remained relatively static (down -0.1 percentage points).

Reviewers on Glassdoor are not surveyed from a nationally representative sample, as reviewers elect to leave ratings and reviews when they visit the Glassdoor website. In a blog post about the first monthly findings from the index, Glassdoor economists Daniel Zhao and Lauren Thomas said the company’s platform uses a “give-to-get” model, meaning users must post reviews or other content to access others’ reviews. “This approach helps ensure that reviewers with moderate opinions, who may feel less inclined to provide reviews, do share their opinions,” they said.

The company has looked to address the potential bias of its user base – skewing towards more educated or higher income workers – by reweighting data by industry to approximate the industry mix from the most recent US Bureau of Labor Statistics workforce data.

Daniel Zhao, lead economist at Glassdoor, said: “Employees have the clearest vantage point of how their employers are doing. Keeping a finger on the pulse of employee confidence is a powerful indicator of business health. The decline in employee confidence in industries such as the information sector highlights the ripple effects of a weakened economy as job insecurity and decreased morale among workers remains top of mind.”