Voluntary Human Resource Disclosure Practices of Selected Listed Indian IT Firms

During the previous two decades Indian economy has shown a tremendous improvement due to emergence of various knowledge based industries. In such industries, firms recognize people as a key resource to gain competitive edge over their peers. Many firms, especially in Information Technology (IT) sector, view their employees or human capital or human resource (HR) as their most valuable assets and invest heavily on them. Many Indian IT firms voluntarily disclose much more information about their human resources than is mandatorily required by the Indian regulations so as to reduce information asymmetry between the insiders and the outsiders regarding their human resources (Jindal&Kumar, 2012). This study measures the extent of voluntary HR disclosures done by selected listed Indian IT firms in two stages. In the first stage, a 33 items voluntary HR disclosure index was developed based on a detailed review of voluntary disclosure indices used in the existing studies of HR disclosures of firms (Jindal & Kumar, 2012; Murthy&Abeysekera, 2007; Abhayawansa&Abeysekera, 2008) and also based on best practices followed by a few Indian IT firms (Infosys, Wipro etc.). In the second stage, a detailed content analysis of annual reports of twenty firms which were part of CNX IT Index as on Jan 8, 2014 was performed using a CAQDAS software to check the variability/presence or absence of all the Voluntary HR Disclosure Index code items. The results of this study shows that Indian listed IT firms (a) provide loads of information about several aspects of 'Training and Development programmes for Existing/New Employees'; (b) provide little information on such crucial matters such as 'Human Resource Valuation', 'Compliance with Employment and Labour laws', 'Geographical distribution of employees', 'Information regarding Employee Commute, Travel', 'Medical insurance/reimbursement' and 'Termination Benefits'.