December 2, 2025
By Swantje Pabst, Advisor & Tammy Vallejo, Advisor
____
Supply chain due diligence isn’t just about compliance — it’s about putting people at the center. Based on its work with leading global companies, including a deep dive practice group focused on supply chain due diligence, Shift has gained important insights into winning internal buy-in, tackling risks beyond first-tier suppliers, and acting on known risks to strengthen protections for workers and communities.
Here are the standout lessons that organizations can apply immediately.
Make it personal: humanize the message
An effective way to get leadership buy-in is to focus less on abstract concepts like “reputational damage” and start talking about real impacts on real people. When you frame supply chain issues as “impacts on people”, it automatically becomes more relatable and urgent.
Key insight: Avoid being seen as only delivering bad news: celebrate actions that lead to positive outcomes for people. Human stories, such as workers receiving remedy, provide powerful evidence of impact.
Build your internal coalition strategically
Creating change requires more than good intentions—it requires strategic relationship building. The most successful programs establish cross-functional steering committees with clear decision-making authority that include leaders from procurement, operations, and other areas with responsibility for implementation. This facilitates buy-in and engagement between key units.
Key insight: Bringing in people who are dealing directly with the issues to share real experiences (e.g., supply chain project managers) ensures practical insights and informed discussions.
Turn crisis into opportunity
Companies that excel at supply chain due diligence don’t wait for perfect conditions—they leverage crises as catalysts for building stronger systems. When problems surface, use them as evidence for why robust monitoring matters and why leadership should invest in prevention.
Key insight: Global teams often spot risks before local operations do. Set up systems to share information quickly and trigger immediate action when issues are detected, rather than waiting for problems to escalate.
Focus on action, not perfect information
One of the biggest mistakes companies make is getting stuck in “analysis paralysis”—endlessly gathering more data instead of acting on what they already know. In most regions and industries, the major human rights risks are well-documented. Instead of repeatedly reassessing whether risks exist, companies can corroborate with even a few assessments and focus on moving to action. If well-known risks are not showing up in assessments, it may indicate deficiencies in the risk management process.
Key insight: Rather than conducting extensive screening to prove a problem exists, ask suppliers to show how they address known risks. A lack of complete data should not prevent action.
Work beyond direct suppliers through partnership
Addressing risks in deeper supply chain tiers requires collaboration, not just compliance demands. Direct business partners may struggle to obtain reliable information from their own suppliers, so companies need to work with them as partners, helping them build capacity to manage risks further down the chain.
Key insight: Build in interaction with relevant actors, including direct business partners, lower-tier suppliers, or affected stakeholders and their representatives, to identify root causes of impacts and define actions to take.
Build smart categories, not endless assessments
The most efficient due diligence systems categorize risks. Use existing internal data—audit findings, worker surveys, incident reports—to identify patterns and build risk categories for different regions, industries, or supplier types.
Key insight: Even small sample sizes from audits can reveal recurring issues. Use this evidence to create targeted interventions for specific risk categories.
Support suppliers to meet requirements
Human rights requirements shouldn’t be afterthoughts—they should be built into supplier contracts from the beginning. During negotiations, explicitly discuss how suppliers will meet these requirements, how they finance necessary improvements, and whether they may need help to do so, especially if they are SMEs. This prevents the common problem of suppliers agreeing to standards they can’t afford to implement.
Key insight: If you automatically eliminate suppliers for human rights violations, you remove incentives to improve. Instead, demonstrate that you’re willing to work together to address issues. Focus on suppliers’ improvement efforts rather than demanding perfection.
Use what you already have
Before building new supplier human rights management systems from scratch, look at what already exists. Many companies have processes in place that could be adapted for human rights purposes with relatively small modifications.
Bottom line: Effective supply chain due diligence isn’t about having the most sophisticated tools or perfect information. It’s about taking systematic action on known risks, building the right internal partnerships, and maintaining focus on actual outcomes for people.
