Pension schemes and investors need to understand how companies they invest in manage their workforce, the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association (PLSA) has said.
According to PLSA guidance, having such information is "a vital component" in allowing investors to see companies' performance measures over the long term.
"There is a growing recognition that companies committed to investing in training and development for their staff - and ensuring they feel secure, empowered and fairly treated in their jobs - perform better over the long-term," said the PLSA.
However, the association reported that most annual reports "currently fail to fully relate the role played by a company's workers in achieving past or future performance".
Luke Hildyard, policy lead: stewardship and corporate governance at the PLSA, said often there was "too little information" about how employees are managed, developed and valued.
They also recommend pension schemes ask investee companies to report on a number of metrics as standards including: gender diversity, employment type, staff turnover, investment in training and development and pay ratios.
The PLSA said reporting or recording these metrics was in some cases authorised, at least in part, by various regulations and believed this was "less a case of an onerous new requirement".
Apart from annual reports, the organisation advised investors to verify these reports externally via online sources regarding particular workplace culture and practices.
Face-to-face meetings and adopting voting policies for annual general meetings were other suggestions put forward.
"Existing and pending reporting regulations will provide some further insight into this area of corporate reporting but we believe this will be of greatest value when seen in the context of a company's culture and working practice," Hildyard said.
"With this in mind we suggest an approach which uses a narrative reporting style that balances data with rationale or context."