Human Rights Reporting

Our expertise in this area

Good human rights reporting matters. It shapes practices, builds relationships and enables market rewards.

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COMPANIES CAN use the process of complying with reporting standards TO ENHANCE INTERNAL CONVERSATIONS AND EXTERNAL RELATIONSHIPS that improve HUMAN RIGHTS PERFORMANCE.

BUSINESSES ARE UNDER growing pressure to be transparent about their “sustainability” performance. Regulators, investors, civil society organizations and consumers are demanding more and better information from companies about the impact their business has on the planet and on people. And there is increasing understanding that reporting on ‘people-related’ financial risks has to be grounded in a full understanding of the impacts from which most of those risks result. In short, it is increasingly evident that businesses need to improve the way they account for their impacts on people; that human rights must be at the core of what they say; and that, done right, the reporting process can go beyond “ticking the box” to become a catalyst for positive transformation.

INVESTORS AND OTHER STAKEHOLDERS CAN GLEAN VALUABLE INSIGHTS FROM WHAT COMPANIES DO AND DON’T REPORT AND USE THE FINDINGS TO INFLUENCE BEHAVIOR

As more and more companies report on human rights, it is important for those using this information to understand how to gain the most valuable insights. People-related information is often unfamiliar to investors and it can be easy to put weight on superficial information while overlooking data that is more predictive of whether a company will manage people-related impacts and risks effectively. The ability to distill this kind of reporting is critical for anyone who wishes to use it as a window into whether companies are creating and protecting long-term value.

“Good human rights reporting can spark meaningful conversations. Through the reporting process, businesses are prompted to discuss and challenge their own assumptions, approaches, and to identify areas for improvement. In parallel, these conversations offer stakeholders valuable insights into a company’s human rights risks, its efforts to address them and the challenges that persist.”
CAROLINE REES, PRESIDENT OF SHIFT

Our Approach

At Shift, we understand the challenges that companies and their stakeholders face when writing, reading and making sense of human rights or ‘social’ disclosure. We work with leading businesses across multiple sectors to help them improve the quality of their human rights reporting and leverage this into improved human rights performance; we help investors to dissect and make sense of what companies report about their management of human rights risks; and we collaborate with standard setters to shape reporting regulations, standards and frameworks that can lead to more meaningful disclosure.

Shaping Reporting Standards

Shift’s work on human rights reporting has shaped today’s sustainability reporting standards.

In 2012, we partnered with Mazars to develop the UN Guiding Principles Reporting Framework – for the first time providing companies with a straightforward way to identify material ‘social’ information for inclusion in their public reports. As hundreds of companies started using this framework, standard-setters increasingly recognized the relevance of this information to sustainability reporting.

Shift team members have been closely involved with the subsequent regional and international developments in social reporting standards, including:

on the Technical Committee that advised the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) on the alignment of its Universal Standards with the UN Guiding Principles;
on the current Sustainability Reporting Board of EFRAG that advises the European Commission on the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) and supporting guidance;
on the Steering Committee of the Taskforce on Inequality and Social-related Financial Disclosures; and
in the Sustainability Reference Group of the International Sustainability Standards Board.

In all this work, we aim to build awareness that information on a company’s efforts to understand and address human rights impacts is material not only for those stakeholders focused on the human rights of workers, communities and consumers; but also for those concerned with today’s crisis of inequality and its root causes; and for those concerned with ‘people-related’ financial risks to business and finance.

Reporting Resources

Our Publicly Available Guidance and Tools Make Human Rights Reporting, and Its Analysis, Meaningful

We draw on our experience, research and analysis to develop public resources that can improve the quality of corporate human rights disclosure and help investors and others derive insight from reported information. Below, you can find our most recent resources.

Other resources:

(*The Reporting Framework and UNGP Assurance Guidance were developed in collaboration with mazars group. Visit the reporting framework project website for more information.)

Dedicated Expert Support

In Addition to Our Publicly Available Resources, We Offer Companies, Investors, and Governments Bespoke Advisory Support.

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Companies

We provide clinic-based training for companies’ sustainability leads and internal audit functions in the European Sustainability Reporting Standards.

We offer individual companies tailored support to improve their social/human rights reporting in line with the ESRS. We help them find synergies that link teams working on sustainability due diligence with those leading sustainability reporting and related internal audit functions. We support shared understanding of the commonalities in these processes and how they can meet both compliance requirements and internal decision-making needs.

We work with companies to evaluate the quality of their human rights disclosure, benchmark it against industry peers, identify gaps or weaknesses in information and the underlying performance and build internal capacity for improvement.

Investors

We provide investors with disclosure analysis and help them use reporting as a window into a companies’ human rights performance and as a resource to inform their decision-making and engagement with businesses. We provide research to understand what indicators and metrics can best provide insight into companies’ human rights performance. And we develop methodologies for robust quantitative disclosures on key issues such as living wages and just transition that investors can leverage in their engagements with companies and standard-setters.

Governments and Standard Setters

We work with governments and regulators to improve human rights reporting requirements as part of the “Smart Mix” of measures needed to fulfill states’ duty to protect human rights. We help standard-setters ensure their sustainability reporting frameworks appropriately incorporate respect for human rights in line with different materiality perspectives. Visit our dedicated page on Standards to learn more.