The most profitable investment for businesses? Happy employees

Forget the mantra of better, faster and cheaper. Companies trying to buoy their financial performance can get a bigger return by making their employees happier.

Stock in firms with high worker-satisfaction ratings have outperformed those with low ratings by nearly 5 percent in each of the past six years, according to analysis by Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America.

Analysts with the lender scrutinized the language workers used to rate their employers on Glassdoor, the largest online repository of company evaluations and reviews, focusing on ratings of culture, compensation, career satisfaction and work-life balance.

Taking those factors into consideration, the analysts ranked the companies and industries, giving the highest scores to communications companies such as AT&T, Verizon Communications, Facebook and Google's parent company Alphabet among others.

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Sectors that didn't score well included real estate and health care.

To date, Facebook and Google are listed within Glassdoor's 10 best places to work in the U.S. in 2019.

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