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The Best Companies for Veterans

Before we dive into this week’s analysis, I wanted to highlight a couple of new product features. If you are a client and want to discuss, please reach out!

  • Since it’s all about financial materiality these days, we are adding total shareholder return (TSR) figures for 1, 3, 5, and 10 years as a metadata field – this will be available in all custom reporting immediately, and will be integrated into dashboards and downloads shortly
  • Our Transparency Score has always been available in custom reporting, but next week we will roll out standalone dashboards allowing clients to easily screen for and compare the most (and least) transparent companies overall and by category

In honor of Veteran’s Day, we wanted to take a look at the best public companies for vets. We currently incorporate 5 different independent lists using various methodologies to rank the best companies for veterans:

Only 3 public companies were included on all lists: Comcast, CACI International, and General Dynamics. Another seven were included on 4 lists: Accenture, Dominion Energy, Home Depot, JB Hunt, Leidos, T-Mobile, and Verizon.

Looking at consistency across time for the top 2 lists, which we place more weight on due to their tenure and methodology, these companies were on at least 10 Best for Vets lists and at least 6 Military Friendly lists: Accenture, AT&T, CDW, Home Depot,  Leidos, Progressive, Travelers, Verizon, and Xcel Energy.

While these external rankings are valuable reference points, they capture only part of the picture. At PeopleReturn, we combine these lists with a broader set of inputs—including company policies, corporate disclosures, public statements, and millions of employee reviews—to build a more complete view of how companies recruit, retain, and support veterans. This integrated approach helps us identify not just who earns recognition, but which companies truly deliver consistent, meaningful support for veteran employees.

What we’re reading:

  • More Talk, Less Action: Companies Touting Gender Equity Often Have Larger Pay Gaps: Investors and environmental rating agencies may believe a company that openly shares information about the number of women it employs, its mentoring initiatives for women, and other gender diversity information is ahead of the curve in creating a more equitable workplace, but research shows just the opposite: Businesses that voluntarily disclosed their gender diversity performance actually showed a wider gender pay gap. (HBS Working Knowledge)
  • How Did We Get a 40-Hour Workweek and Has It Had Its Day? The 9-to-5. Monday blues. Hump day. TGIF. The 40-hour workweek is so firmly embedded in American culture that its norms pepper our language. But for much of America’s 250-year history, eight-hour work days and five-day workweeks were a pipe dream. The regular workweek consisted of six days, with long hours through the week and sometimes a half day on Saturday. When “overtime” entered the language, it originally just meant more work, not necessarily a higher rate of pay. So when and how did the 40-hour workweek become the norm? Why has it stuck around so long, and how is the workweek now starting to change amid contemporary developments like remote work, the gig economy and artificial intelligence? (Wall Street Journal)
  • Capturing employee sentiment as an investment signal: Employee sentiment is a valuable but overlooked aspect of corporate culture. Intuitively, the attitudes of workers should be a key determinant of company success, yet corporate culture metrics – while important – do not fully capture the nuance and immediacy of employee perceptions. A wealth of unstructured data exists in the form of textual reviews, by workers and ex-workers, on open-source platforms like Glassdoor and Indeed. By developing a robust process for analysing this data, we have identified powerful correlations between employee sentiment scores and stock performance. (Impax Asset Managment)
  • Job Hugging: The HR Buzzword That Reveals a Deeper Productivity Crisis: The term tree hugging has been around for decades. It originated from acts of courage—people literally embracing trees to protect them from destruction. Over time, the phrase evolved to symbolise a deep respect for nature and a desire to preserve it. It was about protection with purpose. The term job hugging, however, is something else entirely. It’s a relatively new addition to the HR vocabulary, popularized earlier this year by management consultancy firm Korn Ferry to describe employees “holding on to their jobs for dear life.” Unlike tree hugging, job hugging has no noble cause. It’s a symptom of a stagnant corporate ecosystem. (Observer)
  • PwC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2025: Workers are weighing in on the hotly debated question of AI’s impact on productivity, growth, and jobs. PwC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2025 indicates AI’s impact is growing and that optimism about its potential greatly outweighs anxiety. But our study—one of the world’s largest, with nearly 50,000 respondents spanning 28 sectors in 48 major economies—also shows daily usage is still relatively low and that leaders have big opportunities to unleash motivation and accelerate reinvention and growth. (PwC) and Glassdoor’s Worklife Trends 2026: The 2026 worklife trends report explores the  growing disconnect between employees and their leaders and potential contributing factors: the “forever layoff,” the decay of connection and opportunity for remote workers (and the slow-mo RTO that decay is triggering), a take-what-you-can-get job market, and AI adoption. Yet amid the challenges, there’s a bright spot: real wages for recent grads are catching up to 2020 levels, particularly in emerging cities. (Glassdoor)
  • Does corporate culture really impact the bottom line? Company culture doesn’t affect performance. That’s not a hot take, that’s what a 2022 meta analysis from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found when they compared more than 500 research papers on the topic. And yet, when asked, 92% of executives believe that improving their firm’s culture would increase the value of their company. So are 92% of executives wrong? And are millions, if not billions, of dollars wasted each year on culture efforts? The short answer? Yes and yes. The full answer is a bit more complicated. (Fast Company)
  • EU Parliament Votes to Cut ESG Regulations Amid US Pressure: The European Parliament has voted to dramatically wind back the bloc’s ESG rules following intense pressure from US business associations and state attorneys general. The development means that more than 90% of companies originally in scope of environmental, social and governance reporting requirements will no longer need to comply. Other planks of the rulebook that emerged as a sticking point for the US have been dropped entirely. (Bloomberg)
  • DEI data has become ‘less consistent, less transparent’, says $36 bn pension: San Francisco City and County Employees’ Retirement System is continuing to incorporate ESG and DEI considerations into its fund manager due diligence, even as it recognizes political pressure on institutional investors and portfolio companies. “There’s less information out there on these practices now. It’s less consistent, less transparent. The legal framework is evolving all the time. It’s hard to decipher between [actual] strategic shifts and those that are trying to manage reputations or political risk.”  (New Private Markets)
  • AI Is Upending Jobs. Corporate Tech and HR Are Teaming Up to Figure It Out. Corporate tech departments are seeking the expertise of their human-resources counterparts—and the other way around—as businesses across the country sort through the workforce impacts of artificial intelligence. AI is already wreaking havoc on the white-collar workforce, with chief executives increasingly admitting that the technology will wipe out jobs. It isn’t only a technological shift, but also a cultural one. And the chief information officers responsible for rolling it out say they are joining with their HR peers to teach employees how to use the technology, and not to fear it. (Wall Street Journal)
  • The reinvention of the chief sustainability officer: Financial Times’ analysis of more than 220 US companies with CSOs at the start of this year shows a marked change in the status of the role since Trump’s inauguration. Financial institutions, targeted by a group of Republican US states for restricting funding for fossil fuel companies, were among the first to downgrade or change reporting lines. Since 2023, the number of CSOs in the US reporting through a company’s legal function has doubled from 10 per cent to 21 per cent, according to the US specialist recruiter Weinreb Group. Many of these executives previously held legal roles, usually as general counsel, before becoming CSO. (Financial Times)
  • In the age of AI, CEOs quietly signal that layoffs are a badge of honor: The wave of layoff announcements over the past few weeks is telling us something, most importantly, something that isn’t as easily measured as the number of jobs eliminated. It’s a change in the business environment. We can see this especially in big-company culture, a shift in what is OK and even virtuous to say out loud. Just maybe it’s signaling a new norm for employment and leadership. At its foundation, of course, is AI, regardless of whether companies say so directly. (Fortune)

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