What Investors Should Know About a Company's Workforce

In this podcast, Motley Fool personal finance expert Robert Brokamp discusses factors to consider with Dr. Ben Zweig, the CEO of Revelio Labs and the author Job Architecture: Building a Language for Workforce Intelligence.

Also in this episode:

• The S&P 500 has been an outstanding buy-and-hold investment, partially because the index is always changing.
• The Social Security trust fund will likely be depleted by 2032, so the U.S. senators who will be elected or re-elected this year will have a say in any potential solutions.
• The prices of many essential expenses are growing at a rate above overall inflation while wage and job growth may be weakening.
• A study finds the optimal sitting-standing ratio to make you more comfortable and productive at work.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.

A full transcript is below.

This podcast was recorded on Jan. 17, 2026.

Robert Brokamp: What to know about your stocks workforce and the changing nature of the S&P 500. That is more on this Saturday Personal Finance edition of Motley Fool Money. I'm Robert Brokamp, and this week, I speak with Dr. Ben Zweig, the CEO of Revelio Labs, about the insights that could be gleaned from a company's hiring, firing, pay, and other factors. But first, let's discuss some items that caught my attention from last week. While we talk a lot about investing in individual stocks here at the Motley Fool, we're also big fans of index funds. We have them in our company 401(k), and they're among the most popular choices. The index that is most tracked by index funds is the S&P 500. It can be an outstanding investment to buy and hold for decades. But the index itself changes all the time. Sam Roe writing on his tker substack, that's spelled T-K-E-R cited research from Goldman Sachs, which found that since 1985, 20% of the index's constituents turn over every five years on average, and the amount of time spent in the index is getting shorter. Back in the 1970s, the average company lifespan in the index was 29.3 years, whereas it has been 18.3 years so far in the 2020s. In fact, six of the magnificent seven have been added in the past 25 years. As Sam wrote, "In any given period, there are stocks driving the overall market higher, and often, many of these market leaders eventually stumble and underperform." But other stocks always emerge to take the baton and extend the market's very long trend higher. "For our next item, we'll remind you that this is an election year." A few recent articles have pointed out that the US senators who will be elected or reelected this year to six year terms will likely have a say in how Social Security's shortfall will be resolved.

Currently, benefits are funded from taxes paid by workers, employers, and about half of Social Security beneficiaries, with the rest coming from a trust fund established almost a century ago. However, that fund could be depleted by 2032, a couple of years sooner than expected due to several factors, including a slowdown in employment, a reduction in immigration, and tax breaks in the one big beautiful bill that will result in fewer beneficiaries paying taxes on their benefits. Without a fix, the benefits will be cut by 20% to 25% when the trust fund is exhausted. What could that fix be? Likely, it will be some combination of higher taxes, later claiming ages, means testing benefits, and or changes to the benefit formula. What changes might be most poweble to you? You can see the options and their impact by taking the Social Security challenge from the American Academy of Actuaries at actuary.org forward slash Social Security.

Before you vote this year, find out what changes the candidates plan to support. Now we come to the number of the week, which is 2.7%. That's the most recent reading for the consumer price index announced this past Tuesday, indicating that while inflation isn't accelerating, prices are also not coming down. As pointed out in an article from the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal, many Americans are feeling the pinch because some everyday essentials, such as shelter, food, medical care, and energy, have experienced price increases above the rate of overall inflation. Meanwhile, wage growth for many workers has stalled, as has the job market itself. According to a recent survey of consumer expectations from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the perceived probability of finding a job in three months if one's current job was lost fell to 43.1%, the lowest reading since the survey began in 2013. Thanks to lower interest rates and more tax breaks, a lot of stimulus will be flowing into the economy this year. Hopefully, it will result in wage and job growth without nudging up inflation. We shall see. Next up, what you can learn from the employees of the companies in your portfolio when Motley Fool Money continues.

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Robert Brokamp: For an upcoming episode of Motley Fool Conversations, which can be found on the Fool's YouTube channel, I spoke with Dr. Ben Zweig, a professor at NYU and the CEO of Revelio Labs, which provides workforce analytics for employers and investors. He's also the author of a new book, Job Architecture Building a language for workforce Intelligence. This is just a portion of our discussion, so make sure you go to YouTube to see the whole conversation when it's available later next week. In this segment, we discuss how knowing a company's workforce can make you a better investor. Welcome, Ben.

Dr. Ben Zweig: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Robert Brokamp: If you don't mind, let's start with an example from your book in terms of how you were analyzing what was going on at Meta and anticipating how they were going to change their strategy.

Dr. Ben Zweig: That was a wild story. We had done this analysis with a journalist at Bloomberg. Name is Matt Boyle. He runs the com called Worshift. It's about the future work. We together with this journalist, we discovered that right after Facebook had done the rebrand to Meta, they had been hiring all these people that were skilled in VR and AR all these metaverse types of people people that were skilled in metaverse technologies. What we had seen in this collaboration with Bloomberg was a reversal of that, so at Meta, they had basically stopped hiring people with VR and AR skills immediately just completely dropped off. We saw this, and we were like this is a huge reversal of their strategy. It's a big deal, so we wrote an article about it. Then we heard from the meta Talent intelligence team and their public relations team, and they had said, "Hey, this is not coming from us, we didn't announce this." You know, we are going to contest these findings. So we said, my God maybe this is wrong in some way. Let's check it out. What are the keywords that you're using? Maybe let's try to align so that our trends look the same, and we had worked with them for a little while and basically got the same trend. We thought, This is a real thing, and the ability to basically categorize these things into skills and activities can uncover a very large business shift. It turned out the same way, so we said, hey, we are sticking with it. That's journalistic integrity we're not going to back off, and we didn't back off. A week later, they had made a public announcement that they were retreating from their VR strategy. We got vindicated, but it was pretty scary at the time. I don't know if you realize how intimidating you are in the media, but we felt it.

Robert Brokamp: I'm not personally, but I can see how that would be a little scary. That's a great example, and the one hand, it's so obvious most companies do spend most of their money on their workforce. Like, you, of course, should be looking at what's going on, but it's difficult. You point out in the book that there are four key pieces of data that people should look at employee profiles, job postings, employee perception, and salary benchmarks. I don't know if you want to talk about each of those or just them in general in terms of what they can tell you about a company.

Dr. Ben Zweig: The reason why I think of those four segments is really just because that's the data that's available, so it's not that these are the comprehensive set of information that we'd like. Ideally, I'd love to get data on employee performance. But performance ratings are just not out there, so that's just a nonstarter. This collection of data is really based on what exists and what's feasible to collect. But with that, you can identify, a really good set of what's happening at a company that you have no affiliation to. For investors, investors are in the business of understanding companies that they don't have an affiliation to. We can't really be looking at internal HR data, although that's got things like employee performance that would be nice to have. But the most powerful source of information is online profiles. That can tell you start dates end dates where you get the full workforce dynamics of a company. You can see how many people they have, how many people are coming in in a given time period, how many people are leaving in a given time period. The full stocks and flows of employees and how that breaks down by various employee characteristics, by occupation, geography, skill, seniority. Then, with that, you can see what is the attrition rate, let's say, of some key role? Let's say a bunch of salespeople are quitting at SAP. Maybe you want to short their stock. Maybe they're not going to hit their targets next quarter, so that's a really good indication of who's coming, who's leaving. That really comes from profiles from postings, you get a forward looking proxy for expected hires.

Of course, you get the actual hires from the inflows, but you get a good proxy. If a company has a hiring freeze or if they're hiring for certain key role that meta example was really from postings. We can see what do they want? How is their demand trending for a certain key role, key skill, something like that. Employee perception, I think, is the most underrated one, and there you can see, like what people are writing about how they feel about a company. Employees know a great deal about what's happening inside a company. If you see the business outlook is trending up or trending down, that tells you something about what is the inside scoop of what's happening at this company? How do people feel about an upcoming merger or a new return to office policy or something like that? You get the real inside view. Then I think it's important to list out pay as distinct from all of those because we can get data from how much people make from a variety of sources, and now with pay transparency with new legislation around pay transparency, it's so much more out there. Prices contain so much information about the relative bargaining power between workers and firms and just how those are being shifted from one role to another, what it implies about retention. There's so much information about how much people make and what tells you about a company's strategy. I think that's tremendously powerful. There are also more tertiary datasets out there. There's layoff notices, there's immigration filings, there's freelance platform data. There's a lot out there, but I'd say those four are really the biggest to pay attention to.

Robert Brokamp: Let's move on to how this information can help workers. You wrote in the book, finding a good employer is like finding a spouse. It doesn't happen overnight. You have to kiss a lot of frogs.

Dr. Ben Zweig: You definitely do. Just to belabor that analogy to a point of usefulness, perhaps, if you live in a very small town. I think there was some data on this that shows the generational split of where people found their spouses and found that in our great grandparents era, something like 30% of people I'm butchering this metric. It was in Aziz Ansari's book, Modern Romance, which is excellent, but documents that like some extremely high share of marriages were people that met in their own building. Then sitting outside of that was in their very narrow neighborhood, and now, of course, people find partners from all over. It's a much more distributed market than it's been back when people lived in small villages.

Of course, buildings are only relevant to large urban centers. But I think the point I want to make here is that, a lot of people in labor markets, candidates, job seekers, have a sense of what are the contending occupations from a very narrow viewpoint. When people go out to the market and start looking for a job, maybe after high school or after college, they don't know the occupations that even exist out there. I think a lot about occupations, and I still discover new occupations that I didn't know existed. But if you are from a rural area, there's a very small chance that you've ever heard of what a DevOps manager does. These are things that are obscure, even as you get deeper and deeper into it. What ends up happening is that workers select into occupations based on what their parents do, what their relatives do, what their friends' parents do, what their parents' friends do. This is just what they see, and that could be extremely narrow. Their sense of what's out there is very limited. If you take it even further I have a 4-year-old daughter, and if you ask her what she wants to be there are only a few jobs that she's heard of, and it's like Ballerina or Zookeeper or Astronaut these are a very small share of the global labor market, to say the least. That expands as we grow, but not that much. I think, what's really required is a lot more visibility, a good source of information about what are the occupations that are out there and details about those occupations. How much money do people make? How long do they stay here? What options does it open up when you exit? How do people like? What's the work life balance like? What are the other types of workers that you'll work with? Is it social? These are things that people can get a sense of that would be very valuable right up front, right up front in their jobs.

Robert Brokamp: If you have an opinion on this, but obviously, people are looking for jobs based on what they see on whatever. LinkedIn, indeed, or whatever. Given your experience and your analysis, if you were to look at a job description, how much would you say like that? Yes, that's 100% accurate? Or do you feel like, probably, generally, most people end up doing only 70% of what they thought they were doing when they got their job.

Dr. Ben Zweig: This is a huge question. I think this is one of the most important questions in the age of AI. I'll get to why I think that's such a critical point. But just to validate your presumption when you enter a job, there's some set of information about what you're expected to do? These are the responsibilities. Then you start. First of all, it may have been wrong from the beginning. It may have been written by someone who just doesn't really know or has a very vague sense of what they want people to do. Or maybe as a candidate, you are good at some parts of it and maybe bad at other parts of it, and they decide, let's reconfigure this job to match the profile of the candidate that happens all the time, as well. But I think what's changing most rapidly is the extent to which jobs actually transform after you start. Let's say it was well written and it was purposeful. But then you start, and a few things change. One is that the demands on the business change. For me, in my firm we have, I don't know, 70 people or so. We're relatively small company, and the demands on the business change every day. Every day, there's a new client request, and they say, "Hey, can you guys do this new thing?" We say, for the right price, we'll make it happen, and then figure out who to staff on this. Then we go around and say, hey, who's got the bandwidth, the skills? Who do we trust, if it's high stakes or low stakes? Then we figure out who should do what? We are reconfiguring what people do based on the changing demands of the business. There's also changes on the labor supply side of it. Maybe someone quits. When someone quits, we have to figure out who can take over their workload, who can maintain whatever they were maintaining, who can work on the projects that they were working on.

Or maybe we find out that someone we hired is just extraordinary and they've automated something, or they've taken on some new work or something like that. Or maybe someone starts doing something and they say, "Hey, I actually really don't like this work. "I'd rather be working on something different. Can I move teams? Can I move projects, or I don't like working with this person or whatever it is. But these things change all the time. Because of changing demands of the business, changing composition of the employees that you have, one point I make in the book is that it's really the role of managers to be the liaison between the needs of the business and what the workers can provide, and that is management in a nutshell. Management standing on one foot is job reconfiguration. Now with AI, one thing to say about AII is that really any technology is that it does not automate jobs wholesale. It automates components of jobs. It automates tasks, and then what firms need to do and workers need to do is reconfigure their workload to adapt to some parts of that workload being automated. That's something that has increased the need to reconfigure the work activities in the job, and one argument that I make in the book is that this reconfiguration is trackable. We should be able to see what people do today, what people do a year from today, and how that changes, how that transforms. We have all this information about what people do, and being able to track that leads us to be able to manage it.

Robert Brokamp: It's time to get it done Fools, and this week, I want you to get off your rear ends. Literally. Over my podcasting career, I've gone several episodes on the connection between fiscal and physical well-being. The evidence is clear that healthier people are wealthier and the other way around. The causes and effects go both ways, which brings us to a recent study from researchers at Griffith University and the University of Queensland in Australia, which found that a regular routine of sitting for 30 minutes and standing for 15 minutes while working, reduced back pain and stress and improved concentration in productivity. Someone who has a desk that could be lowered and raised, I can attest to the benefits of going up and down throughout the day, so I encourage you to give it a try, and it doesn't require a new desk. Search online, and you'll find plenty of clever solutions people have come up with to be able to work while standing, and that, my friends, is the show. Thanks for listening, and thanks to Bart Shannon, the engineer for this episode.

As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. I'm Robert Brokamp. Fool on, everybody.

Robert Brokamp, CFP has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Goldman Sachs Group and Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.