Employee experience is a measurable driver of financial performance, not a soft metric, according to new research from Welliba, an award-winning provider of AI-powered people and organisational insight. The firm’s inaugural Hidden Economics report, which analysed more than 25 million public data points drawn from over 150,000 websites, found that the top 100 S&P 500 companies ranked by employee experience (EX) outperformed the rest of the index by 5% in total shareholder return over five years.
The EX data was extracted from publicly available signals without the need for employee surveys.
That 5% margin can mean as much as $13-15 per share for every $100 of investment, based on recent years’ performance of S&P 500 companies. For the average S&P 500 company, that could mean up to $1.7-2 billion in incremental value. The findings establish, at scale, a direct link between how people experience work and how companies perform in markets.
The research maps every S&P 500 company across Welliba’s EX Index, a 24-factor framework spanning six dimensions: Strategy & Culture, Work Content, Conditions, Communication, People & Teams, and Career. The resulting “EX fingerprint” for each organisation reveals where investment in people delivers the greatest return. The study found that unresolved issues quietly compound into performance risk.
“These findings reframe employee experience as a financial variable, not a people or HR programme with soft outcomes,” said David Barrett, CEO of Welliba. “The performance gap uncovered in our research is unambiguous and firmly places EX as a verified driver of performance.”
Barrett says that companies that can track and benchmark EX data and commit to investing intelligently in EX are better positioned to deliver meaningful, better returns for shareholders.
Among the most striking findings:
- Human interactions are the dominant positive driver of EX across the entire index.
- Colleague relationships act as an EX booster for 66% of S&P 500 firms, while direct manager relationships are a top positive influence for 62% of firms.
- By contrast, EX failure is highly contextual — though the data reveals that bottom-up communication is a blocker in ~56% of companies..
The report also segments S&P 500 companies into four performance archetypes: Powerhouses (high EX, high growth), Sleeping Giants (high EX, low growth), Unhappy Performers (low EX, high growth), and Stragglers (low EX, low growth) — giving leaders a practical framework for identifying their current position and the fastest path to improvement.
