The UN Global Compact released a Playbook on Gaining Internal Support for Human Rights Due Diligence and Management (September 2025). The guide was developed as an outcome document from the UN Global Compact Human Rights Think Lab, which convened 20 companies across sectors and geographies to share lessons learned on embedding respect for human rights.
Human Level’s Take:
- Internal buy-in is critical for effective human rights due diligence (HRDD), preventing siloed and reactive processes. Strong HRDD is also a business imperative: it strengthens business continuity, brand value and supply chain resilience while reducing legal, reputational and operational risks. It also offers competitive and financial advantages and is increasingly mandated by regulation.
- The playbook outlines a number of practical steps for companies to generate support. Building internal buy-in starts with senior leaders, who set the tone for HRDD. This can be achieved by linking human rights to business value and external pressures. Think Lab participants shared a number of approaches to do this, including gap analyses, benchmarking, leadership training and clear internal communication. Highlighting existing efforts and using interactive methods like workshops, peer forums and virtual reality makes HRDD feel tangible, relatable and integrated into the business.
- In addition, HRDD in supply chains involves many functions, so companies will need to embed human rights into core systems and processes, for example integrating it into procurement and risk tools, reviewing policies with a human rights lens and working with legal teams to strengthen human rights considerations in contracts and investments.
- Effective HRDD also requires cross-functional collaboration supported by strong governance structures like working groups or taskforces, which foster shared ownership, surface risks, align strategy with operations and create information feedback loops. Clear accountability is critical, and companies can create this by assigning senior leadership responsibility, designating a focal HRDD team, defining roles in internal documents and appointing human rights champions across functions.
- Finally, successful embedding of HRDD requires culture change, capacity-building and internal communication. This can be supported by elements like leadership commitment, tailored training, onboarding modules, interactive workshops and clear KPIs with assigned responsibilities.
