Employee satisfaction pays off: analysis of stock price growth for Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work

Key findings

For each year since 2009, Glassdoor has crowned an annual cohort of companies the Best Places to Work, awarding companies with the best reputations based on employee reviews. We have compared company performance for publicly traded companies on the list, first for performance through 2014 and most recently through 2019. In this piece, we extend the same analysis through October 31, 2025.

Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work outperform the market

We find that a simple portfolio of the publicly traded Best Places to Work has outperformed the S&P 500 by an average of 4.7 percentage points per year since the first award in 2009. Annualized returns for the S&P 500 were 12.6% and 17.4% for the Best Places to Work.

The chart below shows how growth (excluding dividends) would have differed for $1000 invested in January 2009 between an investment in the S&P 500 and a simple portfolio spread across each year’s Best Places to Work winners.

The Best Places to Work premium has been smaller in the six years following the last analysis through 2019, but the portfolio has still outperformed the S&P 500 with annualized growth of 15.0% compared to S&P 500 growth of 13.3%. An initial investment of $1,000 in the Best Places to Work portfolio in 2020 would have grown to $2,313 in 2025, compared to $2,117 for an investment in the S&P 500.

Best Places to Work may be riskier, outperforming in good years but with more downside risk

The Best Places to Work list coincides with two sustained bull markets, the first following recovery from the Great Recession and the second after the market shrugged off fears of a recession in 2022. The S&P 500 price level dropped in four years since 2009. For two of those years (2015 and 2018), the Best Places to Work portfolio saw modest, positive growth. In the other two years (2011 and 2022), the outcome was much worse for Best Places to Work companies. The following chart plots the Best Places to Work premium against S&P 500 returns.

The Best Places to Work portfolio’s outperformance of the S&P 500 is driven by the years in the upper right quadrant. In years where the S&P 500 did well, the Best Places to Work portfolio generally matched or exceeded market performance - in several cases, blowing that performance out of the water. Only one year (2022) was very bad for the S&P 500 over the time series - and that year was even worse for the Best Places to Work portfolio.

Conclusion

Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work program awards companies who build and maintain the strongest reputations among their employees. This contributes to a virtuous cycle of company performance and employer brand, where strong employee engagement and commitment create positive business outcomes and vice versa.

Methodology

We calculated the calendar year price increases for each stock in the Best Places to Work list. Glassdoor typically publishes its Best Places to Work awards in mid-January, so recreating the portfolio would typically include a slightly delayed window from announcement date to announcement date. For 2025, returns are through October 31st. 

We ignore two major components of the returns data for simplicity: dividend yields and stocks whose listing status changes over the course of the year. Because historical dividend payments are difficult to access programmatically for delisted stocks, creating a historical time series proved challenging. This is a limitation if the dividend yield differs substantially between the S&P 500 and the Best Places to Work portfolio, but the historical dividend yield of the S&P 500 has been between 1% and 2.5% over the time period - not enough to offset the Best Places to Work premium, even if the Best Places to Work portfolio had a 0% dividend yield. Delisted stocks pose a separate challenge, as the impact on the portfolio can be positive, neutral, or negative depending on the particular circumstances. For simplicity, we exclude these stocks from the portfolio.