Comparison of employee disclosures between Nordic countries

Abstract

Background: The Nordic countries are generally seen as the leaders in CSR accounting. However, one cannot assume that all the Nordic countries disclose information in the same way. At the same time, few studies have been made that concerns employee disclosures separated from other CSR aspects. Purpose: To analyze and discuss the similarities between the Nordic countries regarding employee disclosures and how this has developed since 2009. Delimitations: The thesis only includes information available in the companies’ annual reports and on their websites. Furthermore, only the GRI information that the companies claim to include in their report is taken into consideration when analyzing GRI disclosures. Method: The study is based on secondary analysis of qualitative data, where the annual and sustainability reports of three largest companies in each Nordic country according to number of employees are examined. The process of content analysis is conducted in two steps. The scoring manual, General overview table and the GRI scoring table are created in order to precede the research. Empirical findings: This chapter includes the tables that show the results from the gathered data with explanations to the content of each table. The tables presented in this chapter are the General overview table from 2009 and 2014, the GRI scoring table for each country and the indicators included table for each country. Analysis: In this chapter, the empirical findings in both, the General overview table and the GRI scoring table are being analyzed with help of the frame of reference in order to investigate how the results connects with previous research and models. Finally, the connections between both of the tables are also interpreted. Conclusions: The thesis shows that most similar way of disclosing the employee disclosures is by using the GRI guidelines. The development from 2009 indicates that the usage of the GRI guidelines has grown while the percentage of the sustainability reports regarding the employee perspective have decreased in all of the Nordic countries except Denmark.