The Most Profitable Companies in the S&P Have Broken This Unwritten Rule
July 8, 2026
I've been saying "being an asshole costs you money" for years. Now there's another shareholder analysis to prove it.
A research firm called Welliba just published something worth paying attention to.
They are not a survey company. That distinction matters. Instead of asking employees how they feel, Welliba deployed AI agents across more than 150,000 websites — Glassdoor , Indeed, Reddit, Inc. , message boards, professional forums, and local equivalents across multiple countries — and collected 25 million data points of employees talking about work when no one from their company was watching. Welliba calls it passive listening.
What's the value? Their entire premise is that traditional employee listening has a structural flaw: employees know HR is reading the results. So they give answers they think are desirable. Consequently, participation rates look healthy, the data is quietly shaped before anyone analyzes it, and it can take months to turn raw survey responses into anything actionable (my fellow psychometricians...I am not saying there is no way around this, I am simply sharing what I know about Welliba). Without the pressure of HR and their boss listening in, the idea is that employees can be more honest about how they are actually treated.
Even better? When companies hire external consultants to survey them (I've been one of those a time or two), we can usually provide generic benchmarks to compare the organizations to their peers on average. Welliba's method permits them to compare organizations directly and explicitly to their competitors.
Consequently, Welliba used passive listening to stack rank every company in the S&P 500 by employee experience, then track total shareholder return over five years. The top 100 companies for employee experience outperformed the rest of the index by 5%.
This is not a DEI argument. It is a shareholder analysis. And at S&P 500 scale, 5% is billions of dollars sitting on the table every quarter while organizations tolerate cultures that tank employee experience and call it the cost of doing business.
It is not the cost of doing business. It is a choice. An expensive one.
Which, if you've read my book, you know I have not been subtle about.
clears throat
“Gallup estimates that it costs between one-half and two times an employee’s annual salary to replace them,377 meaning an employee making $60,000 a year could cost your company anywhere from $30,000 to $120,000 to replace. Consider that you are likely losing far more than one employee per year, and you can see why U.S. businesses alone spend over $1 trillion in turnover annually.
What’s even wilder? 75% of bullied employees report that only one person bullied them .. Is one employee within your organization worth $660,000 to $2.6 million (for the average 100-person organization)? They better shit gold if they are! Additional costs pile on too, with bullied employees taking more sick leave, suing for harassment, and causing losses related to lower productivity and performance (so these bullies better be shitting diamonds now, too).”
Excerpt from The Unwritten Rules of Work: Social Class and Neurodivergent Identities, by Anna Kallschmidt, Ph.D.
People dynamics impact bottom lines. Are we clear?
Back to Welliba:
Of course, my first question is, how did they operationalize "employee experience?" What does that mean in this context? Welliba's model measures 24 factors across six dimensions: 1. Strategy & Culture
2. Work Content
3. Conditions
4. Communication
5. People & Teams
6. Career.
They found that the companies who were performing well had some universal characteristics. Two thirds of companies show the same two top boosters: relationships with colleagues and relationships with direct managers. Human connection is the consistent positive across industries, geographies, and company sizes. It even holds in companies where employees are broadly unhappy — their one bright spot is still the people they work directly with.
I have experienced this myself. I hated the actual work of my first full-time job when I was 20. I did it, and I did it well. But it was torturous. However, everyone on the team got along so well. I don't remember any bullying, gossip, or ganging up on each other. Our work was hard, and our performance evaluations were questionable in their fairness. But we supported the hell out of each other. I don't miss that job, but I do miss those co-workers.
Welliba researchers are explicit about what this means: human connection is table stakes. If your internal survey is coming back strong on team dynamics and manager relationships, you have achieved the floor. Likely, so has your competitor (and if you're in the S&P 500, they have a free tool on their website where you can check!) That is not where the performance gap lives.
The performance gap between companies lives in what's broken. And blocking factors are not universal — organizations fail at employee experience in different ways, which means there is no single generic fix. But one blocker stands out above all others: bottom-up communication is the most common blocker across the S&P 500, present in 56% of companies. No other single blocker appears in more than 29% of companies.
What the data doesn't say — and where my research comes in
What Welliba cannot tell you (at this point) is why. They can identify the symptom at scale. They cannot tell you what the cultural dynamics underneath it are, who bears the cost disproportionately, or why it persists even after organizations think they've addressed it.
My research on unwritten rules adds illumination here. Two of the rules I study — indirect communication and compliance — map directly onto what Welliba is measuring and offer one lens for understanding why bottom-up communication breaks down so consistently.
Unwritten Rule #1: Indirect Communication
White-collar organizations run on indirect communication. Messages are implied, not stated. Disagreement arrives as a question. Feedback comes wrapped in so many qualifications the actual feedback disappears. The responsibility for interpreting the message sits with the receiver, not the sender. This is not neutral. It is a class-coded norm.
Working-class people are socialized in direct communication environments — often for good reason. On a blue-collar job site, you don't politely suggest that someone consider moving if the wall is coming down. You say move. Clear is kind (and potentially life-saving) in these jobs. In direct communication, the speaker takes responsibility for clarity. In indirect communication, that burden shifts to the listener.
When a first-generation professional or a neurodivergent employee enters a white-collar environment, they bring a communication style built for clarity and efficiency. Their organization reads it as aggression, insubordination, or "not a culture fit." Meanwhile, they are trying to interpret an entirely different communication system — one that relies on tone, implication, and context cues that were never explained to them and aren't written down anywhere.
The organizational cost of this mismatch is significant. According to Grammarly's 2024 report, miscommunication costs U.S. companies $1.2 trillion per year. Axios' 2024 annual report puts it at $2 trillion. Whichever number you use, it's more than twice what American corporations pay in federal corporate income tax annually. Isn't that wild?
For neurodivergent employees specifically, indirect communication adds significant cognitive load — decoding implied meanings, interpreting contextual cues, reading unspoken expectations. My research and coaching consistently show that neurodivergent employees stop asking clarifying questions not because they understand, but because asking questions gets interpreted as challenging authority. So they go silent. And their organization loses access to their pattern recognition, their ideas, and eventually, them.
Unwritten Rule #2: Compliance
If indirect communication is the most annoying unwritten rule (my subjective opinion), compliance is the most dangerous one I research.
Compliance is the unwritten rule that you are not supposed to disagree with people in power, even if they appear to be asking for your honest opinion and expertise. You can have the information. You can have the solution. You can raise the concern through the correct channels. But if the organizational culture enforces compliance — explicitly or implicitly — that information does not land. Or worse: it lands, gets dismissed, and the person who raised it is punished.
My dissertation research found compliance — being silenced, told to speak less, or shut down when contributing ideas — present in 56% of respondents across race and gender groups. It was highest among Black men at 70%.
The research on employee silence is unambiguous about what this costs organizations. A meta-analysis on employee silence found that employees who stay silent out of resignation or fear show higher turnover intentions, lower job satisfaction, lower organizational commitment, and poorer task performance. When compliance becomes the organizational norm, you don't just lose the information — you lose the people who had it.
Boeing is the extreme case study. Multiple engineers documented safety concerns about the 737 Max before it went to market. They were not heard. Two crashes. 346 lives. An estimated $32 billion in losses since 2019. Boeing's own CFO acknowledged afterward that they had prioritized speed over listening to their workforce.
Most compliance failures are not life or death. But they are always expensive.
Who bears this disproportionately — and why
These two unwritten rules — indirect communication and compliance — are not equally distributed across your workforce.
My dissertation research, based on 64 interviews with working-class professionals who experienced career mobility, found that 92% had to adjust their behavior to fit white-collar communication norms, and 75% reported negative consequences — being fired, passed over, or sidelined — for failing to conform.
The adjustment burden fell hardest on:
Working-class and first-generation professionals were raised in direct communication cultures — often for safety reasons, often for survival reasons. The indirect, compliance-enforcing norms of white-collar organizations are not instinctive to them. They have to learn a second language while doing a full-time job, without anyone telling them the language exists.
Neurodivergent employees struggle with indirect communication at a neurological level — it adds cognitive load, creates anxiety, and makes the already-difficult task of masking even harder. My most recent research found neurodivergent people reported significantly more pressure to conform to compliance norms than neurotypical people. The traits that make them valuable — pattern recognition, directness, the refusal to accept "we've always done it this way" — are the same traits that get them labeled as difficult.
People of color, particularly Black employees, reported significantly more pressure to conform and be strategic about speaking up. Research consistently shows that Black employees who don't code-switch are perceived as less professional; those who do report chronic anxiety, disturbed sleep, and higher turnover intention. You are paying for that cost whether you see it or not.
These are not separate populations. They overlap. And they are frequently the same people organizations recruited through diversity and pipeline initiatives, and then wondered why they didn't thrive when they entered your culture.
What this looks like in practice — two clients who learned to navigate it
Casey — the vocabulary of institutional power
I worked with a senior leader at a client experience firm. When client relationships were at risk, Casey saw it coming. She tracked signals, mapped scenarios, brought warnings to leadership — which clients were upset, which accounts were at risk, what the early indicators looked like. She was told to be in "air pilot mode." Smile and look pretty. Don't share negative information, even if she came with solutions.
Her exact words: "That's the biggest bullshit I've ever heard in my life. How do you say an account's leaving us and just go whoo-hoo?"
What Casey was doing was risk management. Her organization didn't call it that. And neither did she — until we named it together. In coaching, we worked on reframing how she was already presenting her work — translating the substance she had into the vocabulary her leadership actually responded to. Same information. Completely different packaging.
It landed. Leadership, who had been explicitly telling Casey not to bring bad news, started engaging with exactly the information they had been rejecting.
This is Welliba's "clarity on processes and policies" and "bottom-up communication" factors made human — a Career-dimension metric that correlates with shareholder return in their model. The process for how information reaches leadership was never written down. Casey had to discover it through coaching, after months of being told to stop bringing the information her organization needed.
Tiffany — compliance in action
I worked with an HR professional in manufacturing. Tiffany flagged a problem to her leadership team on a sensitive cost-cutting project. It was quickly dismissed. She was not consulted on it again.
Then the thing she warned about happened. Her organization was dealing with the fallout. She reminded her manager she had raised it. They had completely forgotten she said anything.
This is not a memory problem. This is a compliance culture operating exactly as designed.
In coaching, I gave Tiffany a diagnosis she hadn't had language for: her organization was running on a why vs. how split. C-suite leaders see themselves as the idea generators — the "why." Anyone below them who generates ideas is perceived, consciously or not, as a threat to their status and identity. This is especially pronounced when that person is a woman, a person of color, or someone from a working-class background — anyone the hierarchy has already decided is there to execute, not to think.
Tiffany wasn't being dismissed because her ideas were bad. She was being dismissed because having the ideas at all was the problem.
We worked through specific strategies for navigating this — ways to surface her intelligence without triggering the compliance reflex, and ways to communicate her value in terms her leadership would actually register. She absorbed all of it. Then she said something I haven't forgotten:
"Part of me is grateful for the information because I can do a better job. The other part of me is just like — okay, here comes another mask."
That is the human cost of compliance. That is what Welliba is detecting in their passive listening data when they flag bottom-up communication as broken in 56% of companies. Not the dramatic resignation. The quiet, competent professional who has learned exactly how to make her intelligence palatable to people threatened by it — and who is running the math on how long she can keep doing that.
The organizational cost isn't just the preventable problem they paid for. It's the knowledge Tiffany is accumulating about how to game a broken system instead of being allowed to fix it. And it's the slow erosion of her willingness to keep trying.
Tiffany can learn this skill and adjust. Keep her job, and keep her bosses happy. But these are not the conditions that shape an employee experience that will get your company to a top financial performance.
The connection
Welliba found that the top 100 S&P 500 companies for employee experience outperformed the rest by 5% in total shareholder return over five years. Their data identifies the symptom at scale. My research on unwritten rules offers one framework for understanding the cultural dynamics underneath it.
The 5% TSR gap is not abstract. It is Casey's organization losing clients it didn't see coming. It is Tiffany's organization paying for a problem she already solved. It is the accumulated cost of rules nobody wrote down — measured in billions, one ignored warning at a time.
In addition to telling people, "being an asshole costs you money," I'm also known for saying, "Even for selfish reasons, leaders should be aware of these unwritten rules." Why? Because they cost you money.
The organizations closing that 5% gap are not doing something magical. They are doing something specific: writing down the rules, translating between levels, and building cultures where the people most likely to see problems coming are actually being heard.
That is not a DEI initiative. That is a business decision.
Wondering if unwritten rules are impacting your business? Take the 2-minute quiz → to find out where.