CliQ Pulse Index – H1 2026 Report: CEO Approval Declines
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WHAT’S INSIDE
CliQ Pulse Index · H1 2026
Employees haven’t soured on their companies. They’ve soured on leadership.
Using archived Glassdoor data, we reconstructed how employee ratings and CEO approval have moved across the Fortune 500 — each company measured from its earliest usable archived anchor (various years, reaching back to 2017) to its latest reading — and set that against each company’s stock. Across the 476 employers with parseable readings at two points, the pattern is consistent: overall employee ratings have held essentially flat, while confidence in the CEO specifically has fallen at more than half of large employers — by an average of almost seven points.
As of mid-2026. Each figure is the most recent archived Glassdoor snapshot for that company, read via the Internet Archive. Roughly two-thirds of the usable sample is dated within the past ~18 months; for the rest, the newest archived capture is older. Live values may have moved since — these are point-in-time readings, not real-time.
Read these against the baseline: employer ratings sit in a narrow band — the index averages about 3.7 out of 5, with a tight spread (most companies within about three-tenths of a point). In that compressed range a −0.2 slide is roughly a 5% drop that can push a company well below the pack, even though it barely registers at a glance. CEO approval, by contrast, moves far more — and it moved down, from an index average of about 80 to 73.
The leadership-trust gap
Overall employee ratings barely moved. CEO approval is where the decline shows up — and at some companies it collapsed. Each line below tracks one employer’s CEO approval from its archived baseline to its latest reading.
CSX is the exception that proves the rule — its CEO approval rose most, but from the lowest base in the set (25 → 74 after a leadership change). “Rose” is a direction, not a verdict on the workplace.
The shape of the decline
Those companies aren’t outliers — they’re the tail of a whole distribution that has shifted down. Across the 472 employers with CEO approval and an anchor point prior to 2026, the change centers just below zero: 321 fell, split between a large near-flat group and an even larger cluster down about 10 points, with a long tail past −40 and a thinner band of gains.
Each bar counts employers whose CEO approval changed by that many points (10-point buckets), anchor to latest reading. The 0 bar spans roughly −5 to +5.
Where the decline is steepest, by industry
The leadership-trust slide isn’t uniform. Across all industry groups, CEO approval fell furthest in hospitality & food service, tech, and banking, with pharma close behind; it held up best in frontline healthcare — the only group with a net gain — with transportation, real estate, and industrial manufacturing roughly flat. Overall ratings barely moved in any sector; the movement is in confidence in leadership, not the workplace itself.
All 17 F500 industry groups shown; Insurance — Healthcare (greyed) is a single company, shown for completeness but not a trend.
Companies that changed CEO vs. those that didn’t
Splitting the index by whether a company changed CEO in the window, the cohort that swapped leaders saw a markedly larger approval slide — and was far more likely to cross the 5-point decline threshold. That’s an association, not proof of cause: a change can follow a slide as easily as trigger one. But it’s the pattern in the data.
The flat average hides a split
The index-wide rating move is essentially zero — but that average masks two very different groups. Where employee ratings fell, CEO approval fell with them, and far harder; where ratings rose, approval essentially held. Employee sentiment and confidence in leadership move together — and the downside is amplified: a modest slide in the workplace experience coincides with a leadership-approval drop several times its size.
Employers split by the direction of their employee-rating change (anchor prior to 2026). The two groups roughly cancel on rating, which is why the index-wide average looks flat — but they diverge sharply on leadership approval.
Movement since the last index
This is the first CliQ Pulse Index, so it sets the baseline: an index-average CEO approval of 73 and 55% of employers down 5+ points from their anchor year. Starting with the next biannual pull, this section reports how each of those headline numbers has moved against the prior release.
The index over time
Each release adds a point to the trend below — the index’s average CEO approval and the share of employers down 5+ points, tracked release over release.
One point so far — the line begins with the next release.
When the stock and the workforce move apart
In 15% of the companies we could measure on both dimensions (55 of 377), employee ratings fell while the stock matched or beat the S&P 500 over the same window — a widening gap between what the market rewards and what employees experience. (On a simpler nominal basis, 24% saw ratings fall while the stock merely rose — but much of that just reflects the whole market climbing over each company’s window, which is why we lead with the market-relative figure.)
What employees are telling each other
Reading the public employee discussion behind these numbers, one pattern recurs regardless of industry or stock: the machinery of engagement is running, but employees have stopped trusting what it’s for. Companies still run the annual survey — workers question whether it’s really anonymous, watch the results produce a meeting and little else, and see their own development treated as the thing that gets cut first. The feedback loop is intact on paper and broken in practice.
In employees’ own words
“I shared an office with someone on the ‘Employee Engagement Team’… He had access to the survey results and showed me my responses. Everything I put in with my name attached to it. Never trust that they’re anonymous.”
“My place of work just did a big employee survey… Lowest scores in compensation, communication from upper management, and technology that needs upgrades. So anyway lower management now needs to make action plans to increase team happiness in their day to day work lives.”
“Even when leadership development is needed, the person may be considered too operationally important to leave the floor—which almost guarantees their own development remains secondary.”
“The only response he got on it was ‘just run your employee survey responses through AI, it reads like a bad Tripadvisor review.’”
Public posts from employee forums, quoted verbatim and linked. These illustrate the pattern above, not a representative sample — forum discussion skews toward the vocal and the frustrated.
What it means for people leaders
Leadership trust erodes quietly and shows up in the numbers late. The gap is fillable, and the levers are known: structured onboarding and mentoring, transparent career pathways, real community, and leaders who listen inside the organization rather than reading about it outside. MentorcliQ’s career, skills, and community pillars are built to rebuild exactly that connective tissue — verified internal networks in place of anonymous ones.
Trend comparisons vs. the prior release appear starting with the next biannual pull.
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