Many financial institutions (FIs) struggle to define what good social performance looks like in practice.
Building on our recent work with banks, insurers and investors, Shift has published a report on Social Performance Measurement: Practical Insights and Tips for Financial Institutions. The paper sets out what works — and what doesn’t — when building insightful, decision-useful approaches to measurement.
We offer eight practical tips for moving beyond measuring basic inputs and activities (e.g., “number of human rights assessments completed”, “number of trainings delivered”) toward indicators that capture changes in business practice and behavior, as well as outcomes for people. These tips are organised around the three dimensions that FIs need to measure:
- their own efforts to embed human rights due diligence
- the performance of clients and investees; and
- progress on specific high-priority human rights issues (such as living wage or land rights)
Along the way, it addresses key challenges and misperceptions that can often hold this work back.
The resource is written for practitioners inside financial institutions – sustainability and human rights leads, due diligence program owners, risk officers, and investment and credit professionals – looking to build, refine, or defend a credible measurement approach in an environment where demonstrating ‘what good looks like’ is of increasingly value and importance.
It will be equally useful to those who hold financial institutions to account on their human rights performance – civil society organizations, benchmark managers, regulators, auditors and asset owners – by reinforcing a shared language and a sharper set of questions for engaging the institutions they monitor.
If you are keen to take stock of where your approach sits today, and to better understand where it could go next, we invite you to take a closer look.
