Do you know how stressed Merck employees are? How about the average body mass index of workers at IBM?

Soon, you might.

Several giants of global industry, including Novo Nordisk, Johnson & Johnson, and PepsiCo, on Friday joined forces with nonprofit health advocacy groups to call for businesses large and small to publish information about the health of their employees.

The goal is to give executives, investors, and directors a window into the durability of a valuable corporate asset — the workforce.

“Sadly, many companies have a better sense of the wear on their machinery than the health of their employees,’’ said Derek Yach, chief health officer of The Vitality Group, which designs employee wellness programs and helped organize the initiative, unveiled at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Just what data, exactly, companies might collect and publish remains unclear.

Yach suggested measures such as changes in employees’ body mass index or anxiety levels. Or data on smoking. The information, he said, would be reported in aggregate, not for individuals.

Eileen McNeely, a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who worked on the program, said companies might also measure and report broader metrics, such as whether employees are “socially connected’’ or “full of purpose.’’

She called it the next step in a decades-long effort to encourage companies to be more transparent about their impact on the world outside their bottom line.

“This report is calling for health and well-being to be as central to these nonfinancial disclosures as carbon emissions and waste and water utilization,’’ McNeely said.

One company in the initiative, Allegacy Federal Credit Union of North Carolina, publishes a three-page “corporate health metrics report’’ that rates the company on categories ranging from “leadership’’ to “health status’’ to “environment.’’

Garrick Throckmorton, an assistant vice president at the credit union, said Allegacy has no plans to report “specifically on the literal health of an employee or an employee group.’’

But other companies are doing just that — among them, Discovery Ltd., a South Africa-based financial services organization that signed on to the initiative. (The Vitality Group, which is organizing the campaign, is a member of the Discovery organization.)

In a report last year, Discovery said the proportion of overweight employees rose from 58 percent to 60 percent. On the plus side, employees lost a collective 210 inches from their waist circumferences. The Discovery report also details results from its “10 Ton Challenge’’ that list which departments lost the most weight.

James Zervios, a vice president at the Obesity Action Coalition, worried that publishing such information could spur discrimination against employees who have trouble keeping up with the pack.

“It does inadvertently put a target on employees’s backs who are dealing with obesity,’’ he said.

Yach said he is confident that existing laws are sufficient to prevent companies from firing employees for being unhealthy.

Ike Swetlitz can be reached at ike.swetlitz@statnews.com. Follow Ike on Twitter @ikeswetlitz.