Today we’re launching the PeopleReturn Employee Sentiment Platform—a new way to explore workforce sentiment across every S&P 500 company.
The platform lets you see how employees rate their companies, compare organizations against peers and sectors, and track how sentiment has changed over time. It’s built from millions of Glassdoor and Indeed reviews, mapped through PeopleReturn’s proprietary point-in-time parent-subsidiary database to ensure reviews remain attributed to the correct company throughout acquisitions, divestitures, and restructurings.
This public release is built on the same validated methodology that underpins our work with institutional investors, asset managers, companies, and consultants. Rather than simply aggregating review scores, PeopleReturn transforms employee reviews into a consistent, comparable measure of workforce sentiment designed for investment research, benchmarking, and organizational analysis.
The Employee Sentiment Platform is one component of the broader PeopleReturn human capital intelligence offering. PeopleReturn clients have access to considerably broader coverage—including the full Russell 3000, validated investment signals, configurable methodologies, benchmarking tools, and data feeds built for research and diligence workflows.
A millionaire cashier isn’t a feel-good story. It’s a signal.
The Wall Street Journal recently profiled Tony Barzar, a 60-year-old Costco cashier earning $32.90 an hour who has accumulated more than $1 million in his 401(k).
He is not an isolated case. Costco’s CFO said “many thousands” of its U.S. hourly employees have crossed the same threshold. When millionaire cashiers are a category rather than an anecdote, the story is not simply about one employee. It is about a workforce system.
Costco’s turnover among employees who have been with the company for at least one year is approximately 7%, a fraction of broader retail norms. McKinsey has estimated that replacing a frontline retail employee costs roughly $10,000. The same research found that retailers in the top quartile of employee satisfaction were more than twice as likely to rank in the top quartile of customer satisfaction.
The investment question is whether Costco’s higher wages and long employee tenure should be viewed primarily as expenses—or as investments in experience, productivity, customer service, and organizational culture.
PeopleReturn’s employee sentiment data provides another way to examine that question.
Costco currently scores 71.1, comfortably ahead of its largest big-box peers, and it has held that lead in every month over the past five years.
| Company | Sentiment | Comp | Career | Culture |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Costco | 71.1 | 77.8 | 67.4 | 64.5 |
| Home Depot | 65.9 | 60.4 | 59.5 | 63.1 |
| Target | 59.4 | 53.8 | 49.2 | 54.0 |
| Lowe’s | 58.1 | 54.7 | 52.5 | 53.4 |
| Walmart | 54.7 | 51.9 | 49.2 | 46.6 |
The most revealing part is not Costco’s overall ranking. It is where the company’s advantage appears.
The Journal’s story centers on compensation, benefits, retention, and the possibility of building a long-term career in an hourly role. Those are also the areas in which Costco separates most clearly from its peers. Its compensation score is nearly 26 points above Walmart’s, and its career-opportunities score leads the group by roughly eight points over Home Depot and as much as eighteen over Walmart and Target.
The picture is not uniformly positive. Home Depot, for example, scores slightly better on work-life balance. That kind of variation is precisely what a single company rating can obscure.
Across approximately 8,000 Glassdoor and Indeed reviews over the past 36 months, Costco’s reputation as an unusually strong retail employer is not just visible—it is measurable, comparable, and persistent.
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The Market Repriced Software. Employees Are Feeling the Strain.
Over the past year, investors have sharply repriced large parts of the software industry. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF has fallen substantially, while companies including HubSpot, Atlassian, Workday, and Intuit have suffered much steeper declines.
The concern is specific: if AI agents can perform more of the workflows that per-seat software was designed to support—from project management and marketing automation to finance and HR—the subscription model that powered a decade of software growth may be less durable than investors assumed.
Yet the financial evidence remains mixed. Many of these companies continue to report growing revenue and healthy profits. That leaves investors with a difficult question: is the selloff anticipating genuine disruption, or has the market simply compressed valuations before the underlying businesses have materially weakened?
PeopleReturn’s employee sentiment data offers another perspective.
Across several prominent software and workflow companies exposed to this debate, workforce sentiment has deteriorated over the past twelve months:
| Company | Sentiment | 12-month change |
|---|---|---|
| ServiceNow | 80.1 | −3.6 |
| Intuit | 78.3 | −3.6 |
| Workday | 69.2 | −5.4 |
| Procore | 69.3 | −6.2 |
| HubSpot | 66.6 | −5.3 |
| Oracle | 65.7 | −3.2 |
| Atlassian | 60.8 | −11.3 |
Atlassian is the clearest example. Its employee sentiment score has fallen more than 11 points over the past year, with recent reviews materially weaker than those submitted a year earlier.
That decline does not prove that AI is undermining Atlassian’s business model. Employees may be responding to layoffs, reorganizations, changing compensation, increased performance pressure, or the effects of a falling share price. In March 2026, Atlassian eliminated roughly 1,600 positions—about 10% of its workforce—explicitly to self-fund an AI pivot, while its shares traded near a 52-week low, down roughly 70% from their high.
In this context, the sentiment signal becomes particularly meaningful.
The market measures expectations from the outside. Employee reviews provide a view of conditions developing inside the company. When share prices and employee sentiment deteriorate together—even while headline revenue remains resilient—it suggests that the market’s concerns are being accompanied by real organizational strain.
The pattern is not universal, and the level matters as well as the direction. ServiceNow and Intuit remain highly rated employers despite recent declines. The deterioration is also concentrated among particular software companies rather than technology broadly.
Employee sentiment is therefore not a verdict on whether the “SaaSpocalypse” thesis is correct. It is an additional signal, one showing that the disruption being priced by investors is also appearing in the experiences of employees responsible for navigating it.
The implications extend beyond public markets. Private software companies aren’t repriced every day, making employee sentiment one of the few timely signals investors can use to understand whether conditions inside a business may be changing before they appear in financial results.
For companies without a daily market price, changes in employee sentiment can provide a timely indication that conditions inside the business may be changing before those changes appear in reported results or quarterly valuations.
Two stories, five hundred companies.
Each one has a full profile—overall sentiment, peer and sector comparisons, category breakdowns, and multi-year trends. Look up the companies you follow, or see who leads and who’s slipping.
Explore the PeopleReturn Employee Sentiment Platform
P.S. If you found today’s launch interesting, I’d really appreciate you forwarding this issue to one colleague. Almost all of PeopleReturn’s growth comes from readers sharing our research with their teams, and that’s how we hope to introduce the Employee Sentiment Platform to more investors, advisors, companies, and researchers. Thank you for your support.
What we’re reading:
- Revisiting the Business Case for Diversity & Inclusion Our survey of 152 US business leaders finds that most organizations support diversity & inclusion efforts, yet many still struggle to connect that support to measurable productivity gains. This report offers C-Suite guidance on how to bridge the gaps in leadership alignment, infrastructure, and strategic execution that continue to limit the effectiveness and credibility of diversity & inclusion initiatives. (The Conference Board)
- The World Cup could make 2026 the ‘summer of working from home,’ The 2026 FIFA World Cup may be doing more than entertaining soccer fans — it could also be giving remote work a summer lift. Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford professor who studies hybrid work, says a combination of late-night matches, rising commuting costs, and a summer heat wave could make 2026 “the summer of working from home.” (Business Insider)
- Meta Is Ushering In the Era of the K-Shaped Company You’ve heard of the K-shaped economy afflicting consumers. Call this the rise of the K-shaped company. Just like the broader economic landscape, Big Tech is bifurcating with a widening gap between the haves and have-nots. (Bloomberg)
- Nike Was the Poster Child for Diversity Efforts. That Made It a Trump Target. For decades, the E.E.O.C. investigated employers whose hiring and promotional practices may have been unfair on the basis of race, sex, disability or national origin. The agency also supported employers trying to increase diversity in their hiring pools following years of discrimination where qualified applicants were passed over for roles. Ms. Lucas has redirected that work. In her six years at the commission, and in particular since becoming chair last year, she has targeted companies whose practices she says have been unfair to white men.
- Corporate social responsibility teams facing increased pressure, burnout in 2026 Professionals in charge of executing companies’ social strategy are increasingly being asked to make the business case for their work and measure impacts, according to a new survey from the the Association of Corporate Citizenship Professionals (ACCP). (ESG Dive)
- EEOC Alarms Advocates by Eschewing Public Input on Key Changes The EEOC’s retreat from soliciting public feedback before making major decisions, like rescinding longstanding guidance and rewriting its enforcement playbook, is raising transparency concerns. (Bloomberg Law)
- Burnout, frustration and heartbreak: Amazon layoffs take their toll in saturated job market Amazon has been downsizing more aggressively than many of its peers, laying off more than 57,000 staffers since 2022, or roughly 16% of its corporate workforce. According to data from the website Layoffs.fyi, Amazon has accounted for about 13% of the tech industry’s cuts this year. (CNBC)
- Corporate America spends billions on mental health services. 97% never use it. Every year, American employers pour billions into employee mental health benefits, but only about 3% of employees will ever use the Employee Assistance Program (EAP) their company provides. Out of every 100 workers, 97 never touch the mental health support their company provides. (Fast Company)
- Job Hunters Are Using AI to Cheat in Interviews, and Failing at the Office Employers have long known that candidates might pad a résumé or rehearse their answers. Now the fear goes deeper. Managers worry the entire interaction has been mediated, optimized or even faked by software, leaving managers unsure whether they’ve evaluated a candidate or merely been shown a convincing simulation of one. (Bloomberg)