Workforce disclosure is retreating faster than most investors realize, while one of the best-known human capital investment signals appears to have been largely arbitraged away.
The common thread is that workforce data still matters — but extracting useful signal from it is getting harder.
Companies Aren’t Going Quiet on Workforce Data. They’re Going Selective.
We’re about a third of the way through sustainability reporting season, and the early read is clear: human capital disclosure is falling sharply.
Our 2026 Transparency Score, which measures quantitative disclosure across board composition, workforce representation, employee development, and pay equity, is down across every major index.
But the story is more nuanced. Companies are not abandoning workforce transparency altogether. They are becoming much more selective about what they disclose. The clearest pattern: demographic data is going first.
For S&P 500 companies, leadership-level gender disclosure fell from 86.0% in 2024 to 62.2% this year. Race/ethnicity disclosure fell from 72.5% to 47.6%. More granular racial and ethnic group disclosure fell from 47.6% to 31.4%.
The EEO-1 backdrop makes this trend even more significant. On May 14, the EEOC submitted a proposed rule to rescind EEO-1 data collection, now under review at the Office of Management and Budget. The filing obligation technically remains in force for now, but the agency has still not opened the filing portal or released an instruction booklet — a notable departure from where things stood at this point last year.
Companies were already becoming less willing to publish those reports voluntarily. In the S&P 1500, public EEO-1 disclosure rose from 1.9% in 2019 to 36.9% in 2025, then fell to 28.3% this year. In the Russell 3000, it rose from 0.9% to 19.8%, then fell to 15.0%.
If EEO-1 collection ultimately goes away, race and ethnicity workforce disclosure could fall off a cliff. For many companies, public EEO-1 reports are the only standardized workforce demographic dataset available. Without the underlying filing requirement, investors may be left with fewer disclosures, less comparability, and much more selective reporting.
The same pattern shows up in hiring, promotions, and pay equity. The metrics most closely tied to diversity commitments are being pulled back fastest.
Meanwhile, more operationally neutral workforce metrics are holding up far better. In the Russell 3000, overall turnover disclosure has remained near 20% for years, internal mobility reporting is essentially unchanged, and age-related workforce disclosure slipped only modestly — even as gender and race disclosure fell by double digits.
That distinction is important.
This does not look like companies deciding workforce reporting is no longer worth the effort. It looks like companies editing out the disclosures most exposed to legal, political, or reputational risk while keeping the metrics that can still be framed as operational performance.
The result is a much harder environment for anyone trying to benchmark workforce risk at scale.
Comparability is breaking down. Granular data is disappearing first. And non-disclosure is becoming a much noisier signal — a company that stops publishing demographic data has not necessarily changed its workforce, only its willingness to report it.
We’ll be launching a dynamic, evergreen version of this analysis on the PeopleReturn site in the coming weeks, with regular updates as more sustainability reports are filed.
The same dynamic appears in workforce investing more broadly: as human capital signals become more visible and institutionalized, the advantage shifts from access to interpretation.
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The Great Place to Work Trade Isn’t What It Used To Be
Last year, Jefferies highlighted a striking statistic at Great Place To Work’s For All Summit: the publicly traded companies on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list have outperformed the S&P 500 by more than 2,000% since 1998.
The conclusion seemed straightforward. Companies that treat employees well outperform.
The idea itself was not new. In 2011, Alex Edmans published a landmark paper showing that employee satisfaction predicted future stock returns, arguing that markets systematically undervalued workplace quality and other intangible assets.
We wanted to see what happened after the signal became widely known. So we replicated the portfolio, extended the analysis through March 2026, and ran it through a standard academic factor framework. The result is more nuanced — and more interesting.
A dollar invested in an equal-weighted portfolio of the public Great Place to Work / Fortune 100 Best Companies in February 1998 grew to $20.82 by March 2026. The same dollar invested in the S&P 500 grew to $10.78.
Over nearly three decades, the portfolio almost doubled the market’s ending value.
But the timing matters. The edge was front-loaded — and it lived in the crises.
The strongest excess returns came during the dot-com collapse and the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, when high-trust cultures appeared most resilient. Before Edmans published his research, the portfolio dramatically outperformed the market. After roughly 2012, that edge largely disappeared.
Rolling excess returns collapsed toward zero and have stayed there ever since — occasional positive and negative swings, but no sustained advantage.
The pattern is telling. Once the relationship between employee satisfaction and stock performance became widely known — and embedded into ESG screens, quality factors, and institutional workflows — the easy version of the trade appears to have been largely arbitraged away.
That does not mean employee satisfaction lost its importance. It means the market started pricing it faster.
The underlying logic still holds. Companies with stronger cultures generally recruit better, retain talent longer, and operate more productively over time. What changed is that a once-a-year binary list is no longer enough to create a durable informational advantage.
And that matters for where workforce investing goes next.
The Fortune 100 list is an extremely coarse workforce signal: annual, backward-looking, survey-driven, and limited to a relatively small universe of companies.
At PeopleReturn, we are building something much more continuous. Instead of relying on a single annual designation, we combine employee review trends, workplace certifications, workforce disclosures, hiring patterns, turnover signals, compensation benchmarks, and other human capital indicators across thousands of companies over time.
The opportunity is no longer identifying companies that are obviously recognized as great workplaces. The market already sees those. The opportunity is identifying changes in workforce quality before they become obvious — and distinguishing between companies with genuinely improving employee dynamics and companies simply managing perception.
The original Edmans finding remains relevant because it established something important: employee satisfaction creates real economic value.
The market just became better at pricing the most visible version of the signal.
Methodology: Total returns calculated using adjusted closing prices. Equal-weighted portfolio of public Great Place to Work / Fortune 100 Best Companies, rebalanced annually at publication date, February 1998 through March 2026. Benchmark: S&P 500 (SPY). Risk-adjusted results estimated using the Fama-French five-factor model with HAC/Newey-West standard errors.
What we’re reading:
- Employees who embrace ‘corporate bullshit’ make worse decisions Research from Cornell University found that employees who are impressed by impressive-sounding sentences like, “We will actualise a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing”, rated their managers as more charismatic, even “visionary”. However, these people also recorded lower scores for analytic thinking and cognitive reflection, and scored significantly worse on a test of effective workplace decision-making. (Personnel Today)
- Workers are relying on AI more and coworkers less. It’s unraveling the social fabric of work. AI is unraveling the social fabric of work. For all the drudgery and indignities of our jobs, so much of what made them tolerable — even meaningful — was the way they brought us together with other people every day. We found mentors and confidants, work wives and sometimes real wives. We vented about bad bosses and gossiped after meetings and put our minds together to accomplish things we couldn’t have done on our own. Now those interactions are fading away. (Business Insider)
- Conference Board: We’ve just hit a peak at job satisfaction. AI threatens to completely ruin that for the unlucky 50% American workers just hit a 39-year job satisfaction peak — and we at The Conference Board have the data to prove it. At nearly 69%, it is the highest level of job satisfaction we have recorded since we began tracking in 1987. It may also be the high-water mark. Because the same force most likely to define the next decade of work — AI — is already threatening to pull that number back down for a large portion of the workforce. (Fortune)
- What It Takes to Get a Job at Anthropic Anthropic seeks workers who share its mission: On its recruiting page the company says it’s working on “safely guiding the world through a technological revolution that has the potential to change the course of human history.” For new hires, the rewards are great: Salaries plus equity grants can deliver life-changing wealth — if all goes up and to the right. (Bloomberg)
- Survey reveals that 99% of CEOs now expect AI-driven layoffs companies are racing to replace junior workers with AI, even as many executives remain uncertain about the returns on AI investments (Tom’s Hardware)
- State of the Global Workplace 2026 The State of the Global Workplace report features annual findings from the world’s largest ongoing study of the employee experience. The 2026 edition finds that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020, costing the world economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity. (Gallup)
- Attacks on ESG Investing are Also Attacks on Company Support for Sustainability We believe that visible company commitments to sustainability are a compelling point in ongoing debates in state legislatures and Congressional committees, as bills arise challenging investors’ freedom to integrate sustainability issues into their investment decisions and company engagements. (Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance) and Two steps back, but three forward for sustainability reporting Globally, the US, UK, and more than 30 other jurisdictions are moving forwards on mandatory disclosure regimes across climate, human capital and governance. On the face of it, this renewed divergence would suggest a return to major headaches for international companies. But many commentators argue that other drivers such as customer demand and board-level concerns for resilience, are pushing companies to disclose, whether they are mandated or not. (Reuters)
- The AI fight brewing inside The New York Times How newsrooms should use AI — or if they should at all — has been a recurrent debate within the media industry over the last several years. Increasingly, these rules are being hammered out at the bargaining table between unions and publishers. Right now, employees at The New York Times are gearing up for a fight. (The Verge)
- Workforce future-proofing requires a shift in organizational mindset A net 83% of HR professionals and IT leaders agree that skills improvement is imperative within their organizations. Yet just 34% of companies claim to have a formal, organization-wide program for reskilling or upskilling current employees. (CompTIA)
- Global Talent Trends 2026. Solving the human–machine equation Global Talent Trends 2026 gives you a data‑led, practical view of the workforce trends shaping your decisions—drawn from a global survey of nearly 12,000 executives, HR leaders, employees, and investors across 16 geographies and 16 industries (Mercer)