Setting the tone from the top helps embed respect for human rights throughout an entire business, but remains one of the more challenging elements for companies to get right. Culture is often overlooked by corporate leaders – yet, without it, human rights-related policies and processes become meaningless. Shift’s set of Leadership & Governance Indicators of a Rights Respecting Culture aims to reset the way that executives and corporate boards see their role as leaders and champions of robust human rights management in their company. It provides 12 leadership indicators (focused on the actions of senior leaders at corporate, regional, country and business unit levels) and 10 governance indicators (focused on the actions of the most senior governing body and/or its relevant sub-committee.)
As part of its Valuing Respect project, Shift launched a resource for business leaders and their stakeholders, Leadership & Governance Indicators of a Rights Respecting Culture, which outlines 22 practices and behaviors that help foster business respect for human rights.
The full resource outlines each of the indicators in depth, including an overview of the indicator and its relevance, key questions to determine whether the practice is present, the link to a rights-respecting culture, how the indicator can be applied within a company and supporting indicators that provide additional insight to validate the primary indicators. You can read the full report here: Shift, Leadership & Governance Indicators of a Rights Respecting Culture (February 2021)
Highlighted below are the 22 leadership and governance indicators at a high level:
Leadership indicators
“Senior leaders at corporate, regional, country and business unit levels…”
- “…talk regularly – both internally and publicly – about the company’s commitment to address risks to people across the company’s operations and value chain, and key challenges and opportunities for achieving this goal.”
- “…regularly affirm that all stakeholders must be treated with respect and dignity, and model this in their interactions with the company’s workforce.”
- “…pro-actively and regularly seek the insights and critique of credible experts to inform the company’s understanding of and responses to human rights issues.”
- “…routinely seek out the experiences and views of people across the company’s workforce about how they are affected by the business, and inform them of how their inputs have influenced company decision-making.”
- “…routinely engage with external stakeholders to understand their experiences and views about how they are affected by the business, and inform them of how their inputs have influenced company decision-making.”
- “…engage constructively with affected stakeholders or their representatives with regard to any allegations that the company is involved in major human rights-related incidents in its operations or value chain.”
- “…signal the importance of the internal function(s) or role(s) that lead(s) on human rights by ensuring their insights are integrated into decision-making processes.”
- “…proactively seek to understand and avoid pressures on employees or contractors to act contrary to the company’s responsibility to respect human rights.”
- “…encourage the workforce to raise questions or concerns about the company’s impacts on co-workers or external stakeholders.”
- “…praise actions and decisions that advance the company’s commitment to respect human rights, and call out any that run counter to it.”
- “…collaborate with business peers and other stakeholders to address systemic issues underpinning the company’s salient human rights risks, based on clear action plans, agreed targets and accountability measures.”
- “…encourage the sharing of problems and setbacks, as well as progress and successes, to support improved management of human rights risks and impacts.”
Governance indicators
“The most senior governing body and/or its relevant sub-committees…”
- “…reviews and challenges the company’s business model and strategy to ensure any inherent human rights risks are identified and addressed.”
- “…regularly discusses progress and challenges in addressing the company’s salient human rights risks, informed by related complaints or grievances from the workforce or external stakeholders, root cause analyses of major human rights-related incidents and knowledge of current leading practice.”
- “…reviews and challenges the company’s efforts to influence public policy and regulation to ensure they do not undermine human rights.”
- “…has systems in place to regularly hear the experiences and views of people across the workforce about how they are affected by the business, and informs the workforce about how these inputs have influenced company decision-making.”
- “…has systems in place to regularly hear the experiences and views of external stakeholders about how they are affected by the business, and informs them about how their inputs have influenced company decision-making.”
- “…ensures that cross-functional processes are in place to share information about human rights risks; agree actions to address human rights risks; and monitor progress against those actions.”
- “…requests and reviews a root cause analysis of any incident resulting in severe human rights impacts, in order to ensure that systems, processes and practices are adapted to avoid their recurrence.”
- “…ensures that performance incentives for top management are in place that reflect the company’s salient human rights issues; are supported by relevant KPIs; and are given reasonable weight in compensation schemes.”
- “…challenges any top management performance incentives that may promote behaviors that undermine respect for human rights.”
- “…approves high-level targets for assessing progress in addressing salient human rights risks.”
“Companies are increasingly developing policies and processes to identify and manage severe risks to people that are connected with their operations and value chain. Yet these are worth little if the organization’s primary culture is at odds with the purpose of these documents: if there is no real intent behind commitments made; little empathy or sense of accountability for how people may be harmed; no instinct for learning lessons if they are. Where this is the case, short- term commercial interests will inevitably and repeatedly trump consideration for the people whose welfare is at stake. And the fact of having policies and processes will do only so much to shield a company from the reputational, operational, even legal and financial risks that can result.”
Caroline Rees, President, Shift, Leadership & Governance Indicators of a Rights Respecting Culture (February 2021)
“It is an oft-repeated truth that in organizations ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast.’ This is as true when it comes to a company’s efforts to meet its responsibility to respect human rights – that is, the basic dignity and equality of all people – as it is for any other business objective. […] Yet culture is intangible and hard to measure and, so, it is too often overlooked. The leadership and governance indicators set out in this resource are designed to meet this challenge. They reflect another corporate truism: that “tone at the top matters.” In other words, how leaders act – from the board level to site level – is a powerful leading indicator of whether a rights-respecting culture is in place.”
Caroline Rees, President, Shift, Leadership & Governance Indicators of a Rights Respecting Culture (February 2021)
