Every employer brand exists to answer a single question. What is it like to work here? Employees answer it themselves, unprompted, every time they review a company. We sorted 496,779 reviews of 375 global employers from the last two years into 50 workplace attributes to see what employees actually bring up.
Pay, workload and growth crowd out the rest
Employees concentrate on a narrow band of the 50 attributes we track. Eight attributes account for half of everything said, and the five at the top are the plain machinery of a job.
Base pay is mentioned in nearly a third of all reviews, the single most-discussed attribute of all. Workload follows, in more than a quarter of reviews; then career growth, in a quarter; work-life balance, in one in five; and the quality of your manager, in nearly one in five. They are how you are paid, how hard you are worked, whether you can move up, whether you have a life, and who you report to.
Beyond that handful, employees go quiet. Most of the 50 attributes are mentioned in fewer than one review in twenty.
| Category | % of reviews |
|---|---|
| Base Pay | 31.8% |
| Workload Management | 27.6% |
| Career Growth | 25.2% |
| Work-Life Balance | 20.5% |
| Manager Quality | 18.2% |
| Team Spirit | 17.9% |
| Learning Options | 16.3% |
| Workplace Respect | 15% |
| Work Schedule | 14.9% |
| Colleague Quality | 12.9% |
| Work Challenge | 12.4% |
| Flexible Benefits | 11.5% |
| Job Security | 11% |
| Physical Environment | 8.3% |
| Company Reputation | 8.1% |
The list barely changes from one employer to the next
A pattern this strong in the total could still hide real variety underneath, with each company different and the shortlist emerging only from the average. That is not what happens. When we rank each employer separately, on its own reviews, the same attributes come out on top.
Base pay is among the ten most-discussed attributes for 99% of the 375 companies. So is workload. Career growth, for 97%. Whatever else separates these businesses (industry, country, size, culture), it does not change which attributes their people talk about most.
| Category | % of companies |
|---|---|
| Base Pay | 99% |
| Workload Management | 99% |
| Career Growth | 97% |
| Manager Quality | 93% |
| Team Spirit | 93% |
| Work-Life Balance | 82% |
After pay, the most-talked-about thing is the least liked
Raising an attribute is not the same as being happy with it, and the reviews let us tell the two apart. Every point an employee makes is logged as something good about the job or something wrong with it.
Sorted that way, the shortlist falls into two camps. Some attributes are almost all praise: the people beside you (mentioned warmly nineteen times in twenty), team spirit (nine in ten), and work-life balance (good news about two times in three). Others lean negative, and workload is the starkest. It is the second-most-raised attribute in the whole dataset, and fewer than one mention in ten is positive. Managers and career growth are less one-sided but still lean negative, praised a third of the time and just under half.
So the attribute employees raise most after pay is very nearly the one they are least happy with. That is where an employer brand would earn its keep, on the fundamentals that fill reviews and often disappoint.
| % of reviews mentioning | % of mentions positive |
|---|---|
| 31.8 | 56.4 |
| 27.6 | 8.4 |
| 25.2 | 44.2 |
| 20.5 | 68.4 |
| 18.2 | 33.4 |
| 17.9 | 90 |
| 16.3 | 84.3 |
| 15 | 36.4 |
| 14.9 | 59 |
| 12.9 | 96.1 |
| 12.4 | 55.4 |
| 11.5 | 87.4 |
| 11 | 32.7 |
| 8.3 | 75.2 |
| 8.1 | 91.7 |
| 7.8 | 11.3 |
| 7.8 | 61.7 |
| 6.1 | 53.7 |
| 4.7 | 48.5 |
| 4.6 | 60.5 |
| 4.2 | 45.8 |
| 3.7 | 22.7 |
| 3.7 | 15.7 |
| 3.7 | 23.4 |
| 3.4 | 87.1 |
| 3.4 | 76.5 |
| 3.2 | 26 |
| 3.1 | 61.9 |
| 3 | 41.8 |
| 2.8 | 44.2 |
| 2.8 | 92.4 |
| 1.9 | 66.3 |
| 1.9 | 68.4 |
| 1.8 | 39 |
| 1.7 | 62 |
| 1.7 | 33.7 |
| 1.4 | 87.9 |
| 1.3 | 73.6 |
| 1.3 | 41.5 |
| 1.3 | 81.3 |
| 1.1 | 14.3 |
| 1 | 83.9 |
| 1 | 36.3 |
| 0.8 | 82.2 |
| 0.8 | 83.6 |
| 0.7 | 72.3 |
| 0.6 | 62.3 |
| 0.4 | 81.1 |
| 0.4 | 93.3 |
| 0.3 | 91.2 |
The company’s mission barely gets a mention
What almost never makes employees’ list is why the company exists. The attribute closest to mission and purpose, whether the work is meaningful to society, is raised in under one review in a hundred. The one closest to values, whether the company acts honestly and fairly, is raised in under one in fifty. A culture of innovation is barely more common, and social responsibility rarer still. These are the ideas easiest to reach for in recruitment marketing, and yet employees, describing their own working lives, mostly do not.
| Category | % of reviews |
|---|---|
| Base Pay | 31.8% |
| Career Growth | 25.2% |
| Work Challenge | 12.4% |
| Innovation Culture | 1.9% |
| Ethical Conduct | 1.8% |
| Product Impact | 0.8% |
| Social Responsibility | 0.4% |
We checked whether that was an accident of how we sort the language, and it is not. The words themselves are just as rare. Fewer than one review in a hundred uses “mission” or “purpose” at all, and fewer still use “integrity” or “ethics”. The vocabulary of purpose is simply not how people describe their jobs.
It helps to separate two things that both get called meaningful work. Whether the daily work itself is engaging, employees do raise, in about one review in eight. Whether the company’s mission matters to the world, they almost never do. People often raise whether their own work is interesting; a larger purpose is a much quieter concern.
When purpose does surface, it reads as pride. Mentions of a company’s impact on society are overwhelmingly positive. Values are the reverse. When employees raise ethics and integrity, it is usually a complaint about how the company treats people. Purpose tends to show up as pride; values, as grievance.
Our own survey points the same way
Reviews capture what employees volunteer, and people may volunteer complaints more readily than quiet contentment. So we tested the pattern against research of our own. Additive Force commissioned a survey of employed people, almost all in full-time roles, who are open to a new job but not actively hunting for one. These are passive candidates rather than active jobseekers, so the survey catches what people weigh when they are not in a scramble to move. Fielded in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong, it asked them to choose directly what matters most in weighing up one employer against another.
Across the three markets (n = 600), the answers line up with the reviews. Work-life balance is the most-chosen non-monetary attribute in all three, picked by nearly half of respondents in Malaysia and leading the field in Singapore and Hong Kong too. Job security, career growth and flexible-work options (schedule, location, benefits) sit near the top throughout. The company’s impact on society, by contrast, was chosen by about one in forty in Singapore. Mission, social responsibility and ethics never climb near the top in any market. A different method and a different group of people produce the same shape, with fundamentals first and purpose last.
| Attribute | Lowest market | Highest market | Middle market |
|---|---|---|---|
| Work-Life Balance | 27.5% | 47% | 37.5% |
| Career Growth | 14.5% | 35.5% | 17.5% |
| Job Security | 18% | 34.5% | 21.5% |
| Flexible Benefits | 18% | 29.5% | 23% |
| Social Responsibility | 4.5% | 9.5% | 5.5% |
| Ethical Conduct | 4% | 7% | 6% |
| Product Impact | 2.5% | 8.5% | 3.5% |
One difference between what people volunteer and what they choose is worth noting. Good colleagues and team spirit are praised constantly by those already inside a company, yet rarely chosen as a reason to join one, because they are discovered rather than shopped for. What current employees value and what candidates select on are related, not identical.
It comes back to the fundamentals
What employees value is short, consistent and unglamorous, and much of it is where they feel most let down. None of this means a company’s vision or purpose count for nothing. It means they are not the first thing people weigh when they choose where to work. For anyone doing recruitment marketing, the fundamentals are where the focus belongs. They are what people are actually talking about, and the easiest thing to lose sight of.
About the data
This analysis draws on two sources from the EBI database, frozen to a snapshot on 6 September 2026.
What employees say. 496,779 employee reviews of 375 large global employers on Glassdoor, with review dates from 31 December 2024 to 28 August 2026, a recent two-year window rather than a long-run historical series. Each review is mapped to a 50-attribute workplace taxonomy. “Raised” or “mentioned” means the share of reviews that refer to an attribute at least once; it measures what employees choose to talk about, not a ranking of importance. Sentiment is the split between the “pros” and “cons” sections of a review (positive share = pros ÷ pros + cons), a measure of praise against complaint, not a satisfaction score. “Eight attributes account for half of everything said” is a share of all attribute mentions; the “one in three / one in five” figures are shares of reviews. Company-level consistency ranks each employer on its own reviews, so “in the top ten for 99% of companies” is a claim about rank, not that every company shows the same rate.
Mission and values. The taxonomy has no single “purpose” attribute. We read mission and purpose through Product Impact (“how meaningful the products and services are to society”) and values through Ethical Conduct (“how honestly and fairly the company operates”). Product Impact also captures some purely commercial product-strength language, so the mission reading is directional. As a check against a sorting artefact, we confirmed the raw words (“mission”, “purpose”, “integrity”, “ethics”) are themselves scarce in the review text.
What candidates choose. Primary research commissioned by Additive Force and fielded by Dynata: employed people (97% full-time) who are open to a new role but not actively job-hunting, in Singapore (n=200, May 2026), Malaysia (n=200, June 2026) and Hong Kong (n=200, August 2026). Forced-choice, in two separate stages (pay and benefits first, everything else second), so the two stages are not directly comparable; the figures here are the non-monetary stage. Asia-Pacific only, used as corroboration of the global review pattern, reported by market and never pooled with the review figures.
What we are not claiming. Glassdoor reviewers are self-selected, skew English-language and, in this panel, toward India and major global metros, and mix current and former employees. These findings describe how employees describe large multinationals on Glassdoor, not a representative national workforce. The classification pipeline is not human-validated. This is a cross-section, not a trend. Crucially, this piece is about what employees say only. It does not compare that against what employers publish or claim, which is a separate study.
How these articles are written, where automated analysis ends and human editing begins, and full detail on how the database is built and what it records are on the methodology page.