Companies often approach human rights as a one-off project to be implemented by a specific team, by a specific deadline. In reality, and as many companies have come to realise, integrating human rights goes beyond publishing a human rights policy, adding human rights KPIs to the risk management system and setting up a human rights complaint hotline. The effective implementation of sustainability due diligence requires a change in the company’s processes, structures and culture.

Sustainability is not a task, but a perspective.

It is the way a company relates its business to the world around it. It is not just a change in processes, but a change in the way people see and act. It requires a shift in risk management from an understanding of the risks that external factors pose to the company to an understanding of the risks that the company poses to people. This transformation requires the involvement of multiple functions, but also ownership from every employee. It should be led by professionals with the right expertise and a strong commitment to human rights.

It requires an open mind and a willingness to shift the mindset of the people and how they approach their work – as well as the company’s purpose. To do this well, a company needs to approach it as a longer-term transformation process that brings together multiple business leaders in the company, is driven by top management, endorsed by the board and supported by adequate human and financial resources.

So how do you achieve this transformation?

You need to speak the language of your audience and build ownership internally. For example, if you’re addressing your human resources colleagues, you may need to emphasise the benefits in terms of employee retention. Or if you need the buy-in of your colleagues in the legal department, you may need to frame the issue in terms of compliance and litigation risk. You may also need to adapt your language to fit the location of the person you’re speaking to. For example, with colleagues based in a high-risk country or a country with a weak democracy, you may need to reframe the term ‘human rights risks’ as ‘health and safety risks’ or ‘ethical employment’. By establishing links between corporate sustainability goals and the issues valued by different functions, you will build wider acceptance and ownership of the sustainability agenda across the company and effectively weave social considerations into existing business processes.

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors are interconnected. This has become even more apparent since the unanimous UN resolution affirming a clean, healthy and sustainable environment as a human right. Therefore, environmental and social sustainability should not be treated as two separate issues.

A negative environmental impact almost always has a negative social impact.

Because companies are often more advanced in integrating environmental sustainability into their processes and culture, they can benefit from existing environmental knowledge and processes to establish and strengthen new social governance and processes. Existing knowledge of environmental risks can also help to identify and mitigate some of the company’s human rights risks more quickly. Leveraging existing environmental expertise can therefore accelerate improvements in corporate human rights governance.

The close link between environmental and social, the E and the S, can also be a factor in gaining wider buy-in from teams that own and accept the environmental agenda and goals. The link can also help leverage the often greater resources allocated to environmental governance for the purpose of conducting corporate sustainability due diligence.

An effective corporate sustainability due diligence system hinges on meaningful stakeholder engagement. Start by identifying all relevant stakeholders who may be affected by your organisation’s activities. These may include employees, customers, suppliers, investors, local communities, NGOs and government bodies. There are several ways in which companies can benefit from engaging with different stakeholders, including those who may appear to be adversarial.

First, engaging with potentially affected rightsholders is not only at the heart of effective human rights due diligence, but will also improve the company’s understanding of risks and therefore its ability to mitigate them.

Companies often make the mistake of engaging only with a limited set of stakeholders, such as their own employees, customers and end-consumers – and overlooking groups such as local communities affected by the company’s or its suppliers’ production activities, or temporary workers, who often fly under the radar but face higher human rights risks than workers on the payroll.

Second, robust engagement with suppliers on human rights risks and a shared responsibility approach as defined above will help improve the resilience of the company’s supply chain, as companies will better understand and be able to mitigate the human rights risks faced by their suppliers – and by extension, themselves.

A key consideration for companies is that stakeholder engagement in the context of human rights due diligence needs to be appropriate to the local context. An engagement format that works well with one group may not be effective with another. Therefore, companies need to understand the needs and realities of the stakeholder group and tailor their engagement strategy accordingly.

Third, engaging with a diverse group of stakeholders will help companies strengthen their grievance mechanisms.

Companies often adapt their existing whistleblower hotlines to cover human rights complaints. But this is a typical corporate approach, and often more costly than setting up a human rights grievance mechanism in line with corporate sustainability laws. Early stakeholder engagement can inform the design of the grievance mechanism and ensure that it meets stakeholder needs, thus avoiding costs in the long run.

Fourth, effective stakeholder engagement can help develop appropriate preventive measures and an appropriate human rights due diligence roadmap for the company.

For example, if a human rights risk hotspot is identified, the next step may be to conduct a human rights risk impact assessment.

Fifth, companies can achieve greater impact by engaging with peers and participating in multi-stakeholder initiatives.

Collaborative efforts among peer companies, as well as companies at different levels of a supply chain, can help to address larger, systemic human rights issues. Such sustainability-focused multi-stakeholder initiatives are encouraged by regulators and are exempt from anti-corruption regulations.

Finally, internal stakeholders represent one group of stakeholders that should not be overlooked.

Engaging with various teams within the company can reveal a wealth of information that can serve to inform and improve corporate sustainability due diligence processes.