For investors, unions, civil society and other stakeholders looking to understand companies’ employment practices, annual reports are a valuable resource. Clearer and more informative workforce reporting is an objective that these groups have long been pushing for.

The High Pay Centre analysed workforce disclosure in 2021 FTSE 100 annual reports for a recently-published piece of research by the CIPD, Railpen and the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association (PLSA). We used a framework covering a wide range of workforce-related topics, and examined the use of both narrative and metrics.