Embedding Human Rights into Business Strategy

How Shift Advances the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights

Shift is a leader in advancing respect for human rights in business helping companies and financial institutions embed human rights, social responsibility, and equity into their core strategies. With the global economy facing unprecedented social and environmental challenges, Shift equips organizations with tools to align their operations with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and the growing array of laws and regulations that are codifying the UNGPs into due diligence and reporting standards.

Shift’s initiatives emphasize: human rights due diligence; diversity, equity and inclusion; and transparency in social and labor practices. Under the leadership of President and Co-Founder Caroline Rees, Shift collaborates with companies, investors, and policymakers to develop practical approaches that drive accountability and create long-term value while addressing global challenges.

Shaping Global Standards for Social Impact and TISFD

In addition to aligning global standards with the UN Guiding Principles, Shift played a key role in ensuring European mandatory due diligence and reporting frameworks meet international standards. This alignment provides companies with consistent expectations to both demonstrate and advance responsible business conduct.

Along with the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, Shift is a founding partner of the Taskforce on Inequality and Social-related Financial Disclosures (TISFD). This initiative is designed to support consistent and coherent social disclosures that equip businesses and financial institutions to effectively assess and disclose their social impacts, risks and opportunities, fostering equitable and resilient economies. With support from over 100 organizations globally, the TISFD is chaired by distinguished leaders, including Peter Bakker, Sharan Burrow, Arunma Oteh, and Gabriela Ramos.

Explore More with Caroline Rees

For deeper insights into Shift’s transformative work and vision, explore our conversation with President and Co-Founder Caroline Reese. Discover how Shift is integrating social metrics, advancing DEI, and addressing emerging human rights challenges in business.

“How have human rights issues had a measurable impact on companies’ operations and investor decisions? Could you share examples where these social factors have reshaped risk assessments?”

Rees: Most of us in life aren’t looking at events through the lens of human rights, so it’s easy to miss the many ways the private sector affects lives, both positively and negatively, that are ultimately about human rights. Some of the more obvious examples are goods being stopped at borders due to concerns that they are made with forced labor; or campaigns against companies found to have children cleaning their facilities or working in their supply chains; or regulators and investors expecting companies to show they are addressing gender discrimination in pay. Other examples include investors pressing companies to move their lowest paid workers towards a living wage – which is itself a human right; or banks stepping back from financing pipelines or mining operations that infringe on the human rights of indigenous peoples; social media companies being sued for impacts on the mental health of young people; or claims against companies using or polluting water supplies that rural communities rely on for drinking water. As these and other such examples keep recurring, we see more and more companies grasping the significance of these impacts, adapting to better manage the risks; and we see ever more investors integrating the insights into their analysis and engagement strategies.

What specific social or human capital metrics does Shift focus on to help companies and investors make informed decisions? How do these metrics drive alignment between business strategies and societal expectations?

Rees: The most important need we see is for both companies and investors to scrutinize more carefully whether the social metrics they use are providing the insight they believe. Many are not, as we show in our series on how to strengthen social metrics and indicators. We will be publishing more specific findings on human capital metrics in 2025. A second imperative is to recognize where we might be measuring symptoms without recognizing root causes. For example, child labor, health and safety violations, poverty wages and other supply chain labor abuses can be a product of companies’ own purchasing practices, where factors such as very low prices or high-speed delivery are over-emphasized in their business strategies. So we need to be measuring improvements in those purchasing practices – whether they create or obstruct the conditions for suppliers to meet basic labor rights – and interrogating other ways in which business models and business strategies may be incentivizing the very abuses that business is trying to combat.

Shift has long advocated for DEI as an essential business consideration. How do you see DEI evolving as a strategic issue, especially given the current economic and regulatory landscape?

Rees: DEI is largely about tackling discrimination – explicit and implicit – in our workplaces, which makes it a human rights issue. But we know that simply rolling out training has not moved the needle much. Some suggest it has even been counterproductive. In many regards, DEI comes back to workplace culture, which is driven by leadership behaviors that set the basis, and send the signals, for how people should be treated. And if you get that right in the immediate workplace, it is a shorter step to extending the same logics to how workers in your value chain as well as communities around your operating sites should be treated, and internalizing how business practices need to change to enable that. In some of our work with companies, we have focused on leadership and governance indicators that can help them assess whether these ‘tone-and-behavior from the top’ conditions are in place.

As a pioneer in creating disclosure standards for human rights, what do you believe are the critical gaps in current social-related reporting frameworks? How can TISFD help fill this gap?

Rees: There have been a number of recent developments in sustainability-related disclosure standards. Unfortunately, too much consulting advice is promoting an over-complex interpretation of what is being asked for – at least on the social side. The worst outcome would be for reporting to be treated as a siloed exercise in gathering data for its own sake, rather than a means to gain insight into actual impacts and risks that the business needs to get ahead of.

The TISFD is about bringing that insight, not adding complexity. The Taskforce is not a standard-setter but aims to support consistency and coherence as well as insight and value in social reporting standards. It should help show that assessing material impacts on people is not a separate exercise from the assessment of material risks and opportunities for the company but rather the essential first step to understanding where many of those risks and opportunities lie.

We need a much more integrated understanding of these two dimensions of materiality. The Taskforce will also be looking at the critical issue of inequality as a system-level risk. The Business Commission to Tackle Inequality has shown the risks to our societies and economies, as well as business itself, from today’s high levels of inequality – levels not seen since the 1920s, when they had seismic effects we desperately need to avoid repeating. While the system-level risks of climate change are now widely accepted, the Taskforce will shine a light on the particular system-level consequences of inequality, and how disclosures can give investors line of sight into how well these portfolio-wide risks are being addressed.

Looking to the future, what emerging human rights or social issues do you anticipate will become critical for businesses and investors?

Rees: The issue of living wages will continue to grow in profile, since it is so foundational to tackling inequalities and the threat they pose to social and economic stability today. We need to go beyond ambition and intent to being able to measure actual progress towards living wages over time, for example using the accounting model we developed with the Capitals Coalition. The human rights risks of generative AI, and strategies to address those risks, are already coming into sharper focus, thanks to excellent work underway at the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, working within industry leaders. The same is true of the nexus between human rights and both climate change and biodiversity loss.

We were pleased to work with the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures on their guidance for effective engagement with indigenous peoples, local communities and affected stakeholders  – combining this critical aspect of human rights due diligence with the management of nature-related impacts, risks and opportunities. And we expect to see a deepening of work on the ‘just transition’ to carbon neutral economies. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with the Council for Inclusive Capitalism and other allies, as we work to build practical knowledge of what it looks like in practice to embed human rights considerations into the design of transition plans, and to develop a core set of metrics that will help show whether ‘justness’ is being achieved.