I spent part of this week at Ascend Engage in Las Vegas, a three-day conference run by Ascend, a nonprofit global network that works to advance professionals in the workplace and in corporate boardrooms.
I expected a conference. It felt more like a reunion.
Roughly 2,500 people attended from about 250 companies. Most conferences have a transactional rhythm: attend a panel, make introductions, exchange contacts, move on. A large share of the people I met weren’t attending an event. They were returning to a network they had belonged to for years.
Some had been involved for 15 or 20 years. Ascend was founded in 2005, so those are close to founding-era relationships. Over that span they had changed jobs, moved across the country and moved from early-career roles into senior leadership. Their employers changed. Their Ascend community didn’t.
Framing employee engagement in this way provides a useful perspective.
Companies invest heavily in building community internally, through employee resource groups, mentoring networks and leadership-development programs. Those efforts can be valuable, and they are tied to the employer by design. Leave the company and you generally leave the network behind.
Ascend works the other way. Membership travels with the individual. It connects an employee at a bank with a peer at a technology company, a mentor in another industry, or an executive whose career path doesn’t exist inside their own organization. Those relationships survive the next job, the next city and the next stage of a career. Ascend now runs 22 professional chapters across the U.S. and Canada, which is helping make the portability practical rather than aspirational.
What stood out was how actively large employers participate — not only as sponsors, but as partners in programming, research and employee development. In effect, they are helping employees build a professional network the company doesn’t own and that may outlast their employment there.
That is less altruistic than it sounds, and it works better for being self-interested. Companies get access to a cross-industry talent pool, a credible signal to the employees they already have, and development capacity they would struggle to build alone. The employee gets something portable. Both sides get something they value, which is why the arrangement holds up.
The timing makes it more relevant, not less. Corporate language around DEI has changed considerably. The underlying needs have not. Companies still have to develop talent, retain the people they want to keep and give employees a visible path to leadership. Ascend was founded in part around a persistent gap: Asian and Pacific Islander professionals make up a significant share of the workforce but remain much less represented in senior leadership and corporate boardrooms. Whatever terminology companies use around that problem, the underlying numbers don’t change with the vocabulary.
I was there because PeopleReturn data supports Ascend’s research, and I took part in two sessions on its latest study, ATLAS, which examines what motivates employees beyond pay and promotion.
My larger takeaway was structural rather than analytical. An employee resource group can build community for one chapter of a career. A network like Ascend can be part of the whole story.
The Other Side of the Layoff Story
For the past three years, the story of the corporate workforce has largely been told through layoffs. Hardly a week passes without another major company announcing thousands of job cuts, usually accompanied by some combination of restructuring, efficiency and, increasingly, AI. The implication is hard to miss: companies are learning to do more with fewer people.
Plenty of evidence supports this claim. But layoff announcements capture one side of a larger reshuffling. They tell us which jobs companies are eliminating without telling us how many people those same companies are hiring somewhere else, how many workers are staying, or what companies are spending on the workforce they still want.
What follows is not a survey. It is seven companies—Alphabet and the six largest U.S. banks—where quarterly disclosures are detailed enough to see both sides at once. They don’t describe the labor market, but they do illustrate how much a layoff announcement or headline headcount number can conceal.
Alphabet ended the second quarter with 198,933 employees, nearly 12,000 more than a year earlier and an increase of 6.3%. That is its fastest year-over-year growth since 2022.
The turn was sharp. Alphabet’s workforce was still shrinking year over year as recently as the third quarter of 2024, after several rounds of well-publicized layoffs. Year-over-year headcount returned to growth by the end of 2024 and has accelerated since, from 2.7% in the first quarter of 2025 to 6.3% today.
There is no contradiction here. A company with nearly 200,000 employees can eliminate thousands of positions in one part of the organization while adding more in another. Net headcount also reflects voluntary departures. Hiring, layoffs and attrition all feed the same number, and a layoff announcement captures only one of them.
The six largest U.S. banks show the same gap between the announcement and the arithmetic, with considerably more variation underneath.
JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley together employed 1.08 million people at the end of the second quarter, down 2.0% from a year earlier. That figure fits the efficiency narrative cleanly.
It also conceals where the decline comes from. Wells Fargo and Citi account for all of it and then some: the two banks employ 26,338 fewer people than a year ago, against a combined decline of roughly 22,000 across all six. Wells Fargo’s headcount fell 7.2%, dropping below 200,000 for the first time in our dataset; the bank employed nearly 244,000 people in the second quarter of 2022. Citi cut 4.8%, from 230,000 to 219,000.
The other four added roughly 4,000 people between them. Morgan Stanley grew 3.2%, JPMorgan 1.1% and Goldman Sachs 0.7%, while Bank of America declined 1.0%. Over the longer run, the divergence is wider: since the second quarter of 2022, JPMorgan has added roughly 42,000 employees while Wells Fargo has eliminated roughly 46,000.
There isn’t one banking employment story. There are six institutions making very different decisions about the size and composition of their workforces. Where they converge is in what they spend.
Over the twelve months ending in the second quarter, the group recorded $220.2 billion in compensation expense, up 7.6% from $204.6 billion in the preceding twelve months, while combined headcount fell 2.0%. On an average-headcount basis, compensation expense per employee rose 8.7%. All six increased it.
But there is an important second half to that finding: revenue grew even faster.
Compensation and revenue represent trailing four-quarter figures through Q2 2026 versus the preceding four quarters. Compensation per employee uses average headcount over the corresponding periods.
Combined net revenue reached $638.0 billion, up 11.9% from $570.3 billion, and revenue per employee rose 13.0%, outpacing the 8.7% increase in compensation per employee. As a result, compensation fell from 35.9% of net revenue to 34.5%.
Measured in dollars per head, these banks are spending more on compensation. Measured against what those employees produce, they are spending less. Five of the six reduced compensation as a share of net revenue over the past year.
The exception is Goldman Sachs, where the ratio rose from 31.0% to 31.5% on 19.7% compensation growth, and compensation per employee increased 17.1%, the largest gain in the group.
None of this means the average employee received an 8.7% raise. Compensation expense includes bonuses and other variable pay, and changes in workforce composition move the average on their own. A bank eliminating lower-paid positions while adding more highly compensated employees can increase compensation per employee without anyone receiving a comparable increase.
The broader picture is one of operating leverage as much as rising pay. These six banks generated nearly 12% more revenue with 2% fewer employees at period end, while increasing compensation by less than revenue. Their workers became more expensive on a per-employee basis, but revenue per employee increased even faster.
The compensation ratios also put the divergent headcount strategies in context. Wells Fargo now spends 42.1% of net revenue on compensation, compared with 29.1% at JPMorgan. Business mix accounts for some of that gap, but the contrast is notable: the bank cutting headcount most aggressively also has the highest compensation burden relative to revenue in the group.
Part of what makes the layoff story dominant is visibility. A company eliminating 5,000 positions produces an immediate headline and a concrete number that gets repeated across the media. Hiring 7,000 people across hundreds of teams, functions and locations happens gradually, one posting and one new employee at a time. One side of the labor market arrives in a press release. The other accumulates quietly in the quarterly filings.
Seven companies do not describe a labor market. They do show that headcount is a poor summary statistic. Among these seven, Alphabet grew 6.3% after years of visible cuts. Two banks accounted for the group’s entire net employment decline and then some, while the other four collectively added workers. All six banks spent more on compensation per employee, while five spent less on compensation as a share of what they earned.
Companies are focused on efficiency, and AI is changing the amount and type of labor many tasks require. But “doing more with fewer people” describes only part of what these disclosures show. The more useful questions are which jobs are disappearing, which are being created, and how much companies are willing to pay for the workforce they want next.
What we’re reading:
- EEOC Approves Plan to End Employer Demographic Data Reports The EEOC has voted to approve a plan rescinding longstanding requirements for large employers to share data about the race and gender of their workforce with the agency. The proposal brings the agency much closer to ending the decades-old data collection that assisted with its antidiscrimination enforcement. (Bloomberg Law)
- Employee Engagement Remains Flat as AI Adoption Accelerates During the first half of 2026, 31% of U.S. employees were engaged at work, unchanged from 2025. Eighteen percent were actively disengaged. The topline trend has stalled. Beneath it, the workplace continues to change rapidly as AI becomes a more common part of employees’ daily work. (Gallup) and One in Four U.S. Employees Locked in Jobs for Health Insurance Nearly one in four U.S. workers (24%), the equivalent of about 23 million adults, report “job lock” — staying in their current job, even though they want to leave, because they are afraid of losing their health insurance — according to a new study from the West Health-Gallup Center on Healthcare in America. This marks an eight-percentage-point increase since 2021. (Gallup)
- These AI-Native Companies Have Tiny Staffs and Fewer Bosses The newest generation of companies, infused with AI from the start, offer a vision of how work could soon be structured elsewhere in American corporations: fewer co-workers; more on-staff engineers; and a flatter structure in which nearly everyone is a player-coach instead of strictly overseeing teams. (Wall Street Journal)
- BlackRock, Carhartt, Ford and Google Launch New Alliance to Expand Skilled Workforce Training Four leading American companies have come together to launch the Alliance for America’s Skilled Trades, a new initiative focused on expanding access to skilled trades training and helping meet the nation’s growing workforce needs. The founding members of the Alliance have already independently committed to supporting skilled workforce training initiatives in 30 states across the U.S. (BlackRock)
- Women More Likely to Take Lower-Paying Jobs After Layoffs Women are more likely than men to say they feel pressure to accept lower salaries to reenter the workforce, according to a poll by job search site Glassdoor. Almost two-thirds of women – 63% – said they felt that way after experiencing a layoff, compared with 52% of men. The findings come as the gender pay gap has worsened in recent years. (Bloomberg)
- Don’t Kill Corporate Retreats. Make Them More Like a Kid’s Birthday Party. In an effort to lighten things up and reduce risk—and, let’s be honest, boost productivity through camaraderie—more companies are planning retreats that could have been designed by a bunch of 10-year-olds. (Wall Street Journal)
- Work feels like a ‘situationship,’ employees say Work feels like a “situationship,” according to a report released July 14 by Zety. Akin to a casual dating scenario, 59% of workers told Zety they don’t see a “clear, long-term path” forward with their current workplace. Likewise, the majority of workers said they don’t feel their employers are committed to retaining them long-term. (HR Dive)
- Immigration has transformed the workforce. Will companies catch up? The U.S. workforce has been reshaped by decades of immigration, even as new restrictions are beginning to slow the flow of talent. Research from Harvard Business School’s Edward H. Chang and Marco E. Tabellini shows that companies now face a dual challenge: demographic currents have made the pool of available workers more varied than ever. But systems used to hire, evaluate and advance talent remain rooted in an earlier era. (Harvard Business Review)
- 17 companies that have said they’re doing AI-related layoffs Worries about AI one day replacing human workers have intensified recently — and as it turns out, that future may be here. A number of companies have recently announced staff cuts and cited AI efficiencies as a major rationale. (Business Insider)