For years, the working assumption has been that performing well on so-called “non-financial” stakeholder metrics is detrimental to a company’s profitability and financial performance. New analysis from Just Capital finds that, in fact, the two move positively together in statistically significant ways much more frequently than they diverge.
The research compares Russell 1000 company performance across five stakeholder groups – workers, customers, communities, environment, and shareholders and governance – with four financial metrics: economic profit margin, excess return (alpha), gross margin, and revenue growth. Overall, the results provide insight into the connections between financial and stakeholder leadership, how it varies across industries and issues, and where it appears to be strongest and weakest.
1. All industries have at least one opportunity to improve financial performance through strengthened stakeholder performance. Each company’s unique opportunity is dependent on their industry, and the stakeholder and financial metric in question.
2. The research identified the strength of relationships between each stakeholder and each financial outcome. Among the relationships that reach high statistical confidence, positive links outnumber negative ones by nearly two to one.
3. The strongest relationships between worker performance and returns are in the Consumer Discretionary, Financials, and Real Estate industries; companies that led on worker-related issues subsequently posted the greatest improvements in excess returns, suggesting a potential cause-and-effect relationship.
4. In Technology, companies that made meaningful investments in communities, environment, and governance practices saw the highest subsequent gains in revenue growth.
5. In Telecommunications, the firms with the strongest customer and environment performance delivered the highest improvements in gross margin.
The strongest overall positive relationships across stakeholder metrics and industries were found to be with revenue growth and excess return (alpha), indicating that both the market and customers can reward companies for their stakeholder leadership.
To enable companies to explore how their specific financial and stakeholder performance profile matches up, Just Capital built a new Financial Opportunity module within the organization’s flagship Just Intelligence product.
Although these correlations do not represent a causal relationship with forecasted or guaranteed returns, they provide a valuable input to C-suite decision making and a directional signal for where and how stakeholder and financial performance appear to be linked.
“This is the connection leaders have long sensed but struggled to prove,” said Just Capital CEO Martin Whittaker. “We can now show, industry by industry, where strong stakeholder investment and impact can align with strong financial performance. That moves the conversation from whether the two are related to where a company should focus first.”
The Financial Opportunity module is currently available to subscribers of Just Intelligence.
Just Capital will conduct additional analyses related to financial performance including the mechanisms that underlie these relationships. Future analyses will explore issue-level performance and the relationship to other financial performance measures such as return on invested capital and total shareholder return. The organization will also be building additional modules within Just Intelligence to inform business strategy and responsible AI deployment.
“Our commitment is to keep improving Just Intelligence so leaders always have the sharpest possible view of what drives performance,” said Whittaker. “That work is in service of something bigger, a vision of business where financial success and the wellbeing of workers, customers, and communities move forward together.”
The research builds on Just Capital’s history of exploring how meeting the expectations of the American public drives business results. The organization’s Just 100 Index has outperformed the Russell 1000 equal-weighted benchmark by 79% since inception in 2019.
The research that underpins the Financial Opportunity module was completed in collaboration with New Constructs and used a statistical approach that involved all 767 companies present in the Russell 1000 universe between 2021 and 2025. The analysis was conducted industry-by-industry based on the 11 Industry Classification Benchmark Industries.
For each company, Just Capital compared their annual financial performance measured by economic profit margin, excess return (alpha), gross margin, and revenue growth to their annual performance on key issues that the public has identified as priorities in Just Capital’s polling. The issues are aggregated by stakeholder: workers, customers, communities, environment, and shareholders & governance.
The analysis contained two periods: Period 1 (2021-2023) and Period 2 (2024-2025). The research compared average stakeholder performance in Period 1 with the change in financial performance between Period 1 and Period 2, in order to determine whether strong stakeholder performance results in improved financial performance over time.
For media inquiries, please contact:
Evangeline DiMichele: edimichele@justcapital.com
