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
The boos that greeted Eric Schmidt when he raised the subject of AI during his commencement speech at the University of Arizona reflect an interesting cultural touch point. Days earlier, a real estate executive at the University of Central Florida got the same response. New graduates, it seems, are voicing their fears over one of the toughest hiring markets in years.
It’s against that backdrop that ServiceNow President and CFO Gina Mastantuono shared an interesting perspective on LinkedIn this week. One of the biggest mistakes companies can make in the age of AI, she wrote, is overlooking early-career talent. AI is automating some of the repetitive tasks that used to define entry-level roles, but the answer is not to pull back on investing in young workers; it’s to rethink how we develop them. Early-career employees are often the most AI-native people in the building, Mastantuono points out. They come in with “fresh eyes and fewer assumptions.” Pair them with experienced leaders, she asserts, and reverse mentoring happens naturally.
ServiceNow’s showing in our measures of workforce performance reflects that conviction. The company sits in the top 5% of its industry on career development, a measure that draws on internal hiring rate, tuition reimbursement, talent retention, and average hours of training delivered to employees. It also ranks in the top 5% for percentage growth of U.S. jobs. Oh, and their revenue is on track to grow more than 350% since Bill McDermott became CEO in 2019.
The boos at graduation ceremonies speak to understandable anxieties and fears. ServiceNow’s approach shows a concrete way forward for business leaders looking to become stewards of the next generation and drive growth.
Be well,
Martin
This newsletter was written mostly by humans with a bit of help from AI.
Semafor looks at how recent college graduates are dealing with a distorted labor market as companies reduce junior hiring while increasing AI adoption.
Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reports that in fact some companies are hiring more entry-level workers, particularly those with AI skills.
The Economist argues that governments need to start implementing additional safety nets now before the full impact of AI on the labor market is felt.
Meta is laying off roughly 8,000 employees as it restructures around AI priorities and operational efficiency.
Fortune reports that Pope Leo is launching an AI commission to look at the effects the technology poses for the well-being of humanity.
Inc. reports on a recent statement from Barnes and Noble’s CEO that he’d be willing to sell AI books if they were clearly labeled.
Bloomberg reports that roughly one-third of American workers are now treated as highly replaceable labor.
This chart from Axios looks at the public’s growing concern around the speed of AI development.
This week, I attended the Robin Hood Foundation annual benefit where the spotlight was on food poverty and how even families with two working parents are struggling to get by. It was a jolting reminder of the importance of our mission.
For the first time in three years, wages are lagging behind inflation. At the same time, retailers and manufacturers are passing the full cost of tariffs through to consumers after absorbing what they could on margin. Households are feeling the squeeze of both at once, evidenced by the fact that consumer borrowing saw its biggest monthly jump in March since 2022. Small business optimism on future business conditions and expansion opportunities has fallen to the lowest level in over two years. In some cases, workplace benefits are being rolled back.
In our polling, year after year, people across the political, economic, and demographic spectrum have told us that paying a fair, living wage is the single most important thing a company can do (even when we layer in critical AI-related issues). More recently, fair pricing has emerged as a top concern in its own right. Both are being put to the test right now.
According to United for ALICE, in 2026 approximately 42% to 49% of American families are living with financial strain, near the poverty line, or in economically vulnerable situations. Not only does this put those families in distress, but it also presents a material business risk. Real wages declining while shelf prices climb obviously curtails consumer demand, weakens workforce stability, and undermines confidence in the future more broadly.
Amid the daily frenzy of the markets, AI and global geopolitics, business leaders would do well to keep the financial health of their employees very much in mind.
Be well,
Martin
The New York Times reports that opposition to AI-driven data center expansion is growing across both liberal and conservative communities, with concerns ranging from environmental impact to energy consumption and local quality of life.
Related, Fortune broke the story on a power company that is dropping 50,000 Lake Tahoe residents to reroute their electricity to data centers.
Fortune examines a Gartner study showing many companies automating jobs with AI are struggling to realize the productivity and financial gains they anticipated.
The Wall Street Journal reports that rising fuel costs are offsetting recent pay increases for many Americans. This matches reports from Kraft Heinz showing growing strain among shoppers, with consumers trading down on meats and veggies and prioritizing value purchases.
At the same time, Axios looks at how student loan debt is preventing many Americans from buying homes, starting families, or building savings.
Inc. reports that LinkedIn is laying off 5% of its workforce.
This chart comes from a recent Gallup poll regarding Gen Z and the job market, which reveals that American youth have the most pessimism over job prospects compared to other countries.
Happy May Day. Traditionally a day when the world celebrates workers, this year the homophone is perhaps more apt. The American worker is, by many measures, sending up a distress flare. Job satisfaction has fallen to the lowest level in the 12-year history of the New York Fed’s survey. Wage growth expectations are down. Entry-level hiring is low as Gen Z competes with AI to get a foot on the first rung of the ladder.
But it isn’t all doom and gloom. Against the steady drumbeat of AI-driven layoff announcements, some companies are taking a different tack. This week, Anheuser-Busch announced a $600 million investment in U.S. manufacturing operations, including 15 new technical skills training centers and an expanded commitment to hire veterans transitioning into manufacturing careers. Microsoft recently expanded its partnership with North America’s Building Trades Unions, launching no-cost AI literacy courses and credentials for millions of skilled craft professionals. Meanwhile, Citi is rolling out a new centralized AI operating system that allows their 180,000 employees to securely build agents that help them augment their work and AstraZeneca has certified 17,000 employees in AI competencies.
Our research indicates these kinds of investments can pay off. As of April 28, Just Capital’s Workers Leaders Index, which tracks companies that best meet the American public’s expectations on how they support their workforce, has outperformed the Russell 1000 equal-weighted index by 37% since December 2021. And our Workforce Advancement Leaders Index, which tracks companies with strong training programs, tuition reimbursement, high retention, and high internal hiring rates, has outperformed the same benchmark by 22% over the same period.
The companies investing in new skills and career pathways recognize that trust and engagement can translate into competitive advantage as the AI economy takes shape. I’ll be in Chicago next week speaking at the Win-Win Summit with Covista CEO Steve Beard on exactly that topic.
Be well,
Martin
Fortune reports that an NVIDIA executive has warned the infrastructure and compute costs of AI actually exceeds human labor costs, challenging the idea that companies can automate human work.
The Wall Street Journal reports that OpenAI has fallen short of key revenue and user growth goals as it pushes toward a potential IPO, with the company’s CFO questioning massive data center spending.
Fortune reports that executives and boards are divided over who should control AI strategy, reflecting governance confusion as the technology becomes central to business operations.
Bloomberg reports that Meta is preparing to cut around 10% of its workforce and close 6,000 open roles as the company pushes for AI-driven efficiency.
MSN reveals that nearly 40% of Americans do not have a retirement account.
This chart comes from our recent AI polling, and shows where public and investor perceptions align and diverge when it comes to workforce support, as well where company action is taking shape according to corporate leaders.
