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For those looking at a company from the outside, human rights reporting provides a window.
It helps investors, civil society and other key stakeholders gain visibility into how a company understands and addresses human rights risks. These insights can help them make better decisions and incentivize improvement.
For the company itself, reporting is a mirror.
It helps people inside the company engage in a conversation about how they are addressing risks to people. It helps them build a complete picture that they can explain both internally to senior leadership and the board and externally to stakeholders.
“Good human rights reporting goes beyond a tick-the-box, get-it-done-and-move-on approach. It is less about compliance and more about sparking meaningful conversations within a business. You can tell companies are getting it right when the reporting process helps them not only disclose the right information, but also think about their own assumptions and approaches, and identify areas for improvement.”
At Shift, we believe that human rights reporting is as much about the process as it is about the result. We have witnessed first-hand its power to drive new questions and conversations, bring new insights, and lead to changes in practice that improve the lives of people. We know that good reporting is only one step in a robust due diligence process, but when done right, it is a key catalyst both for the business internally and for its engagement with stakeholders.
That is why we are committed to providing companies, investors, governments and civil society with the right tools and guidance to approach reporting in a smart, effective and inspiring way.
Through tailored workshops, Shift’s experts help companies develop the skills and tools that are necessary to produce high-quality disclosure that both reflects and enables improvements in business practice. Contact us to learn more.
Shift’s experts produce tailored analyses for companies that wish to evaluate their human rights disclosure, benchmark it against industry peers, identify gaps or weaknesses in information and the underlying performance, and highlight opportunities to improve practice in line with the UN Guiding Principles. Contact us to learn more.
Shift, in collaboration with Mazars, developed the UN Guiding Principles Reporting Framework, an easy-to-use tool that is backed by a coalition of almost 90 investors that manages over $5.3 trillion in assets. The Reporting Framework helps companies develop a strong narrative about how they manage their human rights risks and impacts, in line with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. It has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Polish, Japanese and Chinese.
Socially responsible investors who engage proactively with companies can struggle to make sense of corporate disclosure: information can be dispersed across multiple platforms, language can be quite difficult to interpret and human rights risks are not always easy to identify within the narrative. Investors often feel they don’t know what questions to ask companies.
Contact us to learn how our team can provide you with meaningful disclosure analysis and expert support to inform your investment decisions.
Shift works with government agencies, regulators and international organizations that seek to put in place mechanisms to incentivize quality human rights reporting, as part of the ‘smart mix’ of measures that states should implement to fulfill their duty to protect human rights. Contact us to learn more.
January 2019
Over the past few months, Shift has analyzed the human rights disclosure of 18 Canadian mining companies (traditional mining companies, along with a number of streaming and royalty companies). Our research revealed strengths and weaknesses of the sector’s reporting trends, which informed our key recommendations. Undoubtedly, analysis of the Canadian mining sector’s human rights disclosure can be a significant entry point for addressing human rights disclosure, and underlying human rights performance, of the mining industry globally.
September 2018
For 3 years, Shift’s Reporting Program has mapped and analyzed the human rights disclosure of over 130 companies around the world. In this special report, we are bringing the spotlight to France, where we have analyzed and dissected the reporting of the top 20 companies listed on the CAC 40 index (by market cap). The purpose of this two-part report is to evaluate the extent to which the new French legislation brings companies closer to the reporting expectations that were set by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
May 2017 | Michelle Langlois, Shift; supported by the UK Department for International Development, EY and Hermes Investment Management
This research assesses 74 of the world's largest companies for their maturity in reporting on human rights.
