Study Reveals America’s Largest Companies With The Most Bored Workforce

Fortune 500 companies are often portrayed in media and movies as being glamorous and exciting, and many job seekers consider them “dream companies” to work for. However, it’s not all glitz and glam. Like any other company, these corporations aren’t immune to having bored employees.

At PlayUSA, we know how beneficial online casino games can be to offer a quick brain break anytime throughout the workday. So we were curious to find out which large companies’ employees are left needing entertainment throughout the day most often. To find out, we analyzed 2.4 million reviews for all U.S.–based Fortune 500 companies on Glassdoor, specifically looking for reviews that mentioned keywords about experiencing boredom.

Key Findings

• RTX (Raytheon), Albertsons, and Progressive Insurance have the most bored employees.
• Aerospace & Defense, Insurance, and Automotive are the most boring industries.
• Insurance companies account for 4 of the top 10 most boring companies to work for.

The Companies With the Most Bored Employees

After analyzing reviews for companies that included keywords related to boredom, we found that RTX (formerly Raytheon), Albertsons Companies Inc., and The Progressive Corporation (known as Progressive Insurance) have the most bored employees of U.S.–based Fortune 500 companies.

RTX is the product of the 2020 merger between Raytheon and United Technologies Corporation, and the company holds a 3.7 rating on Glassdoor. The aerospace and defense company ranked as having the most bored workforce in our study. We calculated a bored score of 98.26 out of a possible 100. A former senior financial analyst describes their work at the company as follows: “Boring, repetitive and unnecessarily complex work tasks. A lot of managers appear to be clueless about daily operations. Most of the people in my department dreaded coming into work.”

Albertsons Companies, Inc. is one of the largest grocery companies in America. The company operates the supermarkets Albertsons, Safeway, Vons, and Jewel-Osco. The food retailer is rated 3.4 on Glassdoor, and it ranks as the second-most-boring large company to work for in our study, with a bored score of 97.64. A former cashier at Albertsons describes what life is like working inside a grocery store: “This is retail, so be prepared to deal with plenty of annoying and upset customers. Busy or understaffed shifts can feel very overwhelming, but on the flip side, slow days are extremely boring.”

Progressive Insurance is one of the leading insurance companies in America and has a 3.9 rating on Glassdoor. Although their commercials featuring the upbeat squad leader named Flo may make Progressive seem enthralling, working for the company is less exciting. A current customer service representative for the company describes their dull workday, saying, “My job is like working in an assembly line with practically the same script for each caller. It’s boring and is not personally engaging or challenging.”

Having frequently bored employees can not only lower a company’s productivity, but it can also find itself looking for new workers more frequently. The truth is that most people can only stay bored and unfulfilled for so long before they go looking for a more engaging role.

Industries With the Most Bored Employees

To get a more general picture of where employees are most bored, we found each industry’s bored score by averaging the bored score for all companies in that industry. Here were the industries with the highest bored scores:

With a cool name like “aerospace and defense,” you probably wouldn’t have guessed that the industry ranked as the most boring to work in, with an average bored score of 92.42. Although this industry focuses on the design, development, and production of all different types of air and spacecraft, it’s apparently not always as fun as it would seem.

According to a systems engineer at Boeing, there’s a lot of repetitiveness to the job: “Roles can get repetitive after a while in systems engineering, as you get exposed to [the] same specs, test procedures, and processes. Need to find ways to grow and reinvent yourself so you remain challenged and satisfied.”

The two industries that scored the next-highest on our list are the insurance industry, with an average bored score of 88.73, and the automotive industry, with an average bored score of 88.59.

We also found the company within each industry with the most bored workers. Here’s what we found:

States That Are Home to Headquarters of Boring Companies

To provide a more visual view of the top Fortune 500 companies with the most bored employees, we mapped out which of the companies held the highest bored score for each state. (While these companies may have locations all over the nation, these rankings are based on the state that their headquarters are located.) For some states, like Oregon, there was only one Fortune 500 company headquartered in that state, so it won the top spot for boredom automatically.

Here is our map of most boring Fortune 500 company per state.

Nike might be a surprising addition to this map. However, when looking at the reviews, “boring,” “repetitive,” and “stagnant” were common words used. A project manager for the fashion company described their work by saying “Not enough challenges. Can be boring at times.” Meanwhile, a system analyst describes their work similarly, saying, “Very boring, routine work every day,” and a product designer also highlights their workload as repetitive, saying, “Work is often repetitive. There’s so much competition for roles, it’s hard to get promoted internally. With it being such a huge corporation, positions tend to be highly specialized and narrow. So if you need variety in your work, this might not be the best place.”

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Methodology

In October 2024, we analyzed 2.4 million Glassdoor reviews for all U.S.-based Fortune 500 companies. We focused our research on the “Cons” section of Glassdoor reviews for these companies, looking for keywords related to boredom: Bored, Boring, Bore, Monotonous, Monotony, Stagnant, Tedious, Repetitive, Dull, Mundane, Uninspiring, Uninspired, No excitement, Not exciting, Same old routine, Disengaging, Disengaged, Uninteresting.

We deleted any companies with less than 10 bored reviews. Then we found the frequency of bored reviews for each company by stacking the number of bored reviews by the total number of reviews for the company. We then created a bored score with a scale of 0-100 by using a linear transformation technique known as Min-Max normalization.