• Ethics (number and type of employee grievances filed; number and type of concluded disciplinary actions; percentage of employees who have completed training on compliance and ethics)

• Costs (total workforce costs)

• Workforce diversity (with respect to age, gender, disability, and “other indicators of diversity”; and diversity of leadership team)

• Leadership (“leadership trust,” to be determined by employee surveys)

• Organizational safety, health, and well-being (lost time for injury; number of occupational accidents; number of people killed during work)

• Productivity (earnings before income and tax/revenue/turnover/profit per employee; human capital return on investment, or the ratio of income or revenue to human capital)

• Recruitment, mobility, and turnover (average time to fill vacant positions; average time to fill critical business positions; percentage of positions filled internally; percentage of critical business positions filled internally; turnover rate)

• Skills and capabilities (total development and training costs)

• Workforce availability (number of employees; full-time equivalents)

CFO.com contrasted these standards with similar efforts on the part of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB); while SASB also possesses a human capital focus, its standards around the subject tend to be broader and more qualitative. For example, the SASB standard for the apparel and accessories industry says that "[t]he entity shall list the three labor conditions issues and the three environmental health and safety issues that pose the greatest potential risk in the entity’s supply chain." 

Given the strong backing of institutional investors, it is likely that future investors will begin asking companies about their human capital metrics sometime in the future, according to CFO.com, reflecting a growing demand that businesses demonstrate, beyond healthy profits, evidence of being good corporate citizens.