Although most large corporations routinely collect data on employee turnover, benefits expenditures, training costs and so on, they rarely make that information public. But that could be a mistake, claim Fabienne Autier, associate professor of human resources management, and Rodolphe Durand, associate professor of strategy, both with E.M. Lyon in France, and Stephen Gates, principal researcher of the Conference Board in Paris. The researchers contend that companies should regularly release human-resources-related statistics, just as they do financial data such as operating costs and research and development expenditures.Those and other findings are contained in the December 2002 paper “There's More to Cooking than Reading the Recipe: The Case for HR Information Disclosure.” For that research, the authors conducted a worldwide survey of 102 international companies based in Europe and the United States. The study revealed that although businesses are collecting an increasing amount of human resources data, less than 10% disclose that information publicly. For the companies that don't, the top reason cited was that they wanted to keep human resources information secret from competitors, mainly because they wanted to prevent rivals from imitating their best practices for attracting and retaining talented employees.That fear is basically unfounded, assert the authors.
