How Formal Should a Company Sound When It Reports ESG Results to Employees

Companies spend heavily on reporting their environmental, social, and governance results. Most of that reporting is aimed at investors and regulators. Employees read it too, and how a firm talks to its own people may matter as much as what it says. A forthcoming paper in Contemporary Accounting Research examines one part of that choice: how formal the language should be.

The paper is by Kyle Mao, Assistant Professor of Accounting at the McCoy College of Business at Texas State University, with Kathryn Brightbill of Utah State University and Todd Thornock of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Its title is “Communicating ESG Outcomes to Employees: The Role of Language Formality in Shaping Employee-Firm Relationships.”

The question

Language formality is the difference between a message written in a stiff, official register and one written in a plain, conversational voice. The same ESG result can be reported either way. The paper’s title indicates that the study asks whether that stylistic choice changes the relationship between employees and the firm.

The paper has been accepted at Contemporary Accounting Research, a journal published for the Canadian Academic Accounting Association. At the time of writing, we could not locate the published version, an abstract, or a digital object identifier. For that reason this summary does not describe the study’s method, sample, or results. Those details are left to the full article.

Why the question matters

Accounting research has begun to treat employees as an audience for corporate social responsibility and ESG disclosures. Mao’s earlier work is part of that line. A 2024 paper in the same journal, with J. D. Douthit and P. R. Martin, studied how a firm’s social responsibility affects employee effort. A 2026 paper in the Journal of Management Accounting Research examined how employees react when a firm selectively discloses its social responsibility results.

The new paper extends that work from what firms disclose to how they say it. For managers, the practical stakes are clear. Internal ESG communication is cheap to change. If tone alone shifts how employees see the firm, that is a lever most companies are not yet managing on purpose.

What to watch for

When the article is available, readers should look for three things: how the researchers measured formality, which aspects of the employee-firm relationship they tracked, and whether the effect depended on the ESG result being good or bad news.

This summary is based on the paper’s title and citation only. The abstract and full article were not available to us, so no findings are reported here.

What it means for managers

• ESG reporting has an internal audience. This paper treats employees, not investors, as the readers of a firm's ESG outcomes.
• Tone is a design choice. The paper's focus is whether formal or informal language shapes the relationship between employees and the firm.
• Findings are not summarized here. Consult the published article in Contemporary Accounting Research before acting on it.

Brightbill, K., Mao, Z., & Thornock, T. (2026). Communicating ESG outcomes to employees: The role of language formality in shaping employee-firm relationships. Contemporary Accounting Research.