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Case Studies | Monday August 25, 2014

Improving the Lifecycle Energy Impacts of Notebook Computers in the Production Phase

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The Challenge

Dell wanted to improve the lifecycle sustainability impacts of its notebook computers. Through its own work gathering lifecycle data from suppliers, as well as involvement in collaborative initiatives, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s PAIA (Product Attribute to Impact Algorithm) and The Sustainability Consortium, Dell had already identified the hot spots and other critical impacts that must be addressed to substantially improve the sustainability of notebooks.

Viewed through the lens of the product, these impacts constitute two types of sustainability attributes:

• Physical attributes: Material content, energy use (efficiency), and recyclability
• Embedded attributes represented by the sum total of production impacts (energy use, water use, waste production, social and labor effects, etc.) from extraction to component manufacture, assembly, and transport

Many of these impacts are related to the practices of suppliers, recycling partners, and transport and logistics providers. This is particularly true in Dell’s case, as all manufacturing and some elements of design and service are contracted out to a few original design manufacturers (ODMs). With respect to energy and emissions, for example, Dell has conducted lifecycle assessment (LCA) studies that suggest that half of the lifecycle energy use and related emissions for a typical notebook computer are found in the supply chain (extraction, manufacture, and transport), with the other half represented by product use.

While important progress is being made in these areas of supply chain performance, the sustainability team at Dell saw an opportunity to make its supply chain practices even more sustainable—and hence improve its notebooks’ overall sustainability profile—by working with the Center for Sustainable Procurement (CSP) to find new ways to engage and support ODMs.

The key decision-makers were Dell’s marketing and product development division, commodity team, supplier management division, operations, and its ODMs.

Our Strategy

To define the focus and scope of this case study, Dell and CSP first considered the following questions:

• What are Dell’s business and sustainability priorities for notebook computers?
• Where are we likely to find opportunities to improve sustainability performance that also create business benefits for our suppliers and partners?
• In what areas are suppliers most likely to have at least some of the capacity, data, and infrastructure needed to drive improvement in a reasonable time frame?

Dell and CSP agreed that, to be successful, any proposed improvements would need to be cost effective and scalable, produce real sustainability improvements, and maintain or improve quality—all without causing any delays in production. To achieve these objectives, Dell assembled an internal, cross-functional team that brought together key players in the overall product development process, especially the commodity purchasing teams responsible for determining the desired product specifications and the supplier management teams whose job it is to work with supplier partners to make sure that Dell product specifications and production standards are being met. CSP then engaged this internal team to ensure that it fully understood and was aligned with Dell’s broader sustainability goals, and specifically, to determine how they can approach and partner with ODMs to improve the lifecycle energy impacts of notebook computers in the production phase.

Our Impact

While Dell already incorporates environmental standards into product specifications and has robust processes in place to monitor and improve suppliers’ operating practices, the two have not historically been linked. Improving the total lifecycle sustainability performance of notebooks required Dell to connect the dots between the commodity purchasing teams and those who directly manage key suppliers. Through these internal engagements, the company has aligned these teams to support its sustainability goals.

These internal engagements also led to a pilot project with an ODM partner to better understand the supplier’s energy usage with the ultimate goal of understanding how the supplier can reduce its energy use and improve notebooks’ overall lifecycle impacts. The pilot’s goal is to collect available baseline energy data from ODMs, identify opportunities for energy reductions at the facilities level, provide guidance to the ODM to realize improvements, and then measure the phase’s energy use after the project has been executed.

The information gathered and lessons learned through this pilot project will ultimately help Dell to better manage its supplier relationships and drive decision-making around procurement that improve embedded energy in this complex product category.

Lessons Learned

The power of connecting internal teams that historically have not been linked was a key lesson learned. In the case of Dell, the commodity purchasing and supply chain management teams benefited greatly from first aligning on broad sustainability objectives. They then developed category strategies for notebook computers that incorporated specific sustainability attributes as a way to create business value for the company.

Stronger internal alignment also led to a more cohesive supplier engagement strategy, particularly with Dell’s long-term suppliers with whom the company must partner to realize sustainability gains, specifically as they relate to improving the lifecycle sustainability impacts of its notebook computers.

Case Studies | Monday August 25, 2014

Purchasing Higher Quality Paint to Save Cost and Make the Case for Sustainability

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The Challenge

Of the 5,200 buildings Telenor Real Estate maintains in Norway, most are small buildings made to house technical equipment. For this reason, most of them are situated on islands, along coastlines, on mountaintops, and in other areas with harsh weather. Most, if not all, of the buildings are built out of wood, the country’s most common building material. Due to the harsh weather and the building’s materials, they must be repainted quite often, about every five years. Repainting them involves several factors that contribute to the overall cost: paint, labor hours, and travel.

Our Strategy

Initially, Telenor focused on reducing the cost of painting all of their buildings. They analyzed these costs and found that the biggest potential for impact was with travel and labor costs. The cost of paint was relatively low, so by cutting travel and labor, they could have the most significant effect on total cost. By increasing the intervals between paintings, they could reduce the number of times the painters would have to travel to the buildings, reduce the number of suppliers, and assign each supplier more buildings to manage.

Telenor noticed that on some buildings the paint lasted longer and discovered that those buildings had higher quality paint. The company then concluded that, by using the highest quality paint on the market, they could increase the intervals between paintings from approximately five years to about seven years. While higher quality paint would be more expensive up-front, the other savings would outweigh these initial expenses.

Telenor put out a competitive bid to several painting companies, specifying the paint to be used and designating more buildings per supplier. Over time, the company has reduced its suppliers to two.

Our Impact

The savings from reducing the number of times the painters had to travel to the buildings amounted to a 40 percent cost savings. Additionally, by repainting less often, the suppliers used less paint. Since this change, Telenor has also begun requiring their building maintenance company to use higher quality paint.

Telenor’s decision wasn’t driven by environmental consciousness, but since finding that sustainability can offer monetary advantages, the company is beginning to incorporate this thinking into its other procurement activities and decisions.

Lessons Learned

Telenor found that the best way to reduce costs was to choose the more sustainable option, showing that sustainability and lower costs aren’t mutually exclusive. Since the real estate team found that more sustainable choices offer business opportunities, it will be able to make the case for sustainability more easily in the future.

Additionally, having fewer suppliers allows Telenor to work more closely with them and build stronger relationships, which in turn helps the company and suppliers collaborate to tackle more sustainability challenges. Telenor was also able to introduce their suppliers to a more sustainable way of operating. Because of this case study, Telenor’s suppliers have become more environmentally conscious.

Case Studies | Friday July 26, 2013

Vodafone: Respecting Human Rights in the Digital World

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The Challenge

The information and communications technology (ICT) industry faces numerous human rights challenges and opportunities at a time when international consensus has emerged around the corporate responsibility to respect human rights. These human rights "hot spots" range from upholding labor rights in the ICT supply chain to promoting freedom of expression and protecting privacy among consumers online.

The Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights—which establish clarity on government's duty to protect and business' responsibility to respect human rights—indicate that businesses should act with due diligence to avoid infringing on human rights and address actual or potential adverse impacts on human rights.

Vodafone enlisted BSR to help apply the key elements of the Guiding Principles to the company's human rights strategy and operations.

Our Strategy

BSR led a three-part process to align Vodafone’s strategy with the Guiding Principles:

• Created a human rights map: To identify Vodafone’s human rights risks and opportunities, we used the International Bill of Human Rights as a baseline (The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,  and International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights).
• Identified hot spots: Next, through tagging of risks and opportunities, BSR singled out human rights hot spots of significance for Vodafone.
• Analyzed opportunities to improve company practices: Finally, we reviewed the company’s policies and processes on identified human rights hot spots, compared them to the requirements of the Guiding Principles, offered examples from other companies, and made recommendations on how the company could address those issues.

BSR’s analysis identified the categories of human rights most relevant to Vodafone’s business: labor rights; civil and political rights; rights of the child; economic, social, and cultural rights; land and property acquisition; and the environment.

Our Impact

Based on our analysis, Vodafone has:

• Reinforced the inclusion of human rights in the Vodafone Code of Conduct.
• Strengthened its due diligence process for entering new markets (either unilaterally or through partnerships with other operators).
• In its reporting, brought together details of its policies and programs relating to identified human rights hotspots to more closely align to the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

Our Lessons Learned

Helping Vodafone review its human rights strategy demonstrated why it is important for companies to look at these issues in a holistic and collaborative way:

• By examining not only risks but opportunities to advance human rights, it is easier to gain support from senior management and improve performance as a whole.
• It is important to develop a strategy that is comprehensive enough to be applied across country operations but that is flexible enough to adapt to local needs.
• The telecommunications industry lacks a relevant industry standard for reporting on human rights, underscoring the need for companies to work with their peers to define relevant indicators to report performance on human rights challenges to stakeholders.

Case Studies | Friday May 3, 2013

Telefónica: Assessing Human Rights Risks and Opportunities

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The Challenge

In today’s networked world, the information and communications technology (ICT) sector is facing increased scrutiny for its role in enabling and inhibiting human rights—including issues as diverse as privacy rights; labor standards in product manufacturing; resource extraction in conflict zones; and contributing to respect for rights such as freedom of expression, health, and education.

The Spanish telecommunications company Telefónica, which operates in 16 markets in Europe and Latin America, has an interest in applying the same level of human rights protections in all of its diverse regions.

Telefónica engaged BSR to assess its human rights impacts, risks, and opportunities in each of its operating regions—marking what may be the first time a company in the ICT industry has done this.

Our Strategy

BSR worked with Telefónica to build an organizationwide human rights strategy grounded in a firm understanding of the company’s risks and opportunities to enhance human rights and gain business value through market differentiation and social innovation. We started by conducting a corporate- and country-level human rights impact assessment (HRIA) that included three steps:

1. Internal assessment: We reviewed the company’s corporate policies and procedures and developed a global tool to measure Telefónica’s human rights risks and opportunities across 16 markets.
2. Local assessment: Next, Telefónica’s country-level markets completed an HRIA to uncover risks and opportunities. This was done by examining the company’s management systems and activities, addressing regional risks and opportunities, examining its history of performance on human rights issues, and evaluating local stakeholders’ perceptions about the company’s impacts.
3. Analysis and strategy plan: Based on these assessments, BSR provided practical recommendations to help the company address stakeholder expectations, strengthen management systems where needed, and improve due diligence on human rights at the corporate and country levels.

Our Impact

Telefónica’s new human rights plan has helped the company align decision-makers across all markets as well as at the corporate level. Through the plan, the company also has developed a plan for corporate headquarters and country-level operations to improve due diligence, risk mitigation, and management of opportunities.

Lessons Learned

Working with Telefónica on its human rights strategy demonstrated why it is important for companies to look at human rights in a holistic way:

• By examining not only risks but opportunities to advance human rights, it is easier to gain support from senior management and improve performance as a whole.
• It is important to educate in-country staff on human rights issues so they can help identify and address local challenges. It is also important to develop a strategy that is comprehensive enough to be applied across country operations, but that is flexible enough to adapt to local needs.
• In an HRIA, stakeholder engagement helps ensure that decision-makers understand the local context and use that knowledge to assess the effects of existing management systems and initiatives.

Case Studies | Monday November 5, 2012

Western Union Summit: Addressing Education Needs and Creating New Business Opportunities

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The Challenge

Education has the power to improve both individual and community well-being, helping regions become more competitive economically, reduce poverty, and support democratic activities. Yet even though the UN has identified universal primary education as one of the eight Millennium Development Goals, approximately 61 million school-age children are not enrolled. An additional 71 million are not enrolled in secondary school.

Western Union has 510,000 agent locations in 200 countries and territories, reaching tens of millions of customers worldwide. Many are un-/under-banked and live in the communities where education is a particular challenge. Western Union asked BSR to help design and facilitate a process that would allow the company to engage with external experts to identify solutions for educational needs that also could potentially grow its business.

Our Strategy

To gain an understanding of the education challenges and identify opportunities for Western Union to fill the gap through its products, services, and global reach, BSR facilitated a strategy summit that gathered external education experts and key Western Union leaders.

Based on our original research and drawing on BSR’s deep experience in stakeholder engagement, we identified external thought leaders and designed a workshop that allowed for open dialogue, rapid knowledge sharing, innovative brainstorming, and the prioritization of new business ideas that could be translated into action immediately after the workshop.

The workshop brought together 10 Western Union senior executives, who had direct leadership of key business lines or regions, with nine external stakeholders from global NGOs, development organizations, and other companies. The preparation and structure allowed for business representatives to learn from the external participants about education challenges, and for the external representatives to share their expertise with Western Union, a company that remains positioned to make a difference.

This innovative format allowed Western Union to identify and evaluate new business ideas, and the participation of senior executives ensured that the new ideas could be implemented. The format also helped Western Union engage external thought leaders in a strategic way—a rare example of a company bringing in issue experts as part of product development.

Our Impact

The summit generated 20 new product and services ideas—including direct payment of teachers, restricted-use money transfers for school fees, and adult education via new mobile products. The company began to partner with a third-party organization to test its first priority concept in key markets less than five months after the workshop. Just 10 months after the summit, Western Union shifted its cause marketing focus toward this issue. In September 2012, Western Union’s “Education for Better” program was announced on the floor of the United Nations.

The event also confirmed the value of this type of engagement for Western Union. It improved the company’s reputation among stakeholders who were impressed with the company’s commitment and transparency. And, by generating tangible new business ideas, the process also demonstrated the business benefits of this approach to senior company leaders.

As Thor Hauge, Vice President, Business Development, Western Union Ventures put it, “I’ve been to many brainstorming sessions that have lasted weeks. We accomplished more in eight hours than any of those sessions.”

Western Union is now planning a second event of this kind to explore this model for future product development.

Lessons Learned

Too often, stakeholder engagement focuses solely on gathering feedback. But this innovative model—which included clear objectives for tangible outcomes and involvement of senior leaders from key geographies and business units—allowed Western Union to co-create solutions with stakeholders. Additionally, by starting with a social need, the company was able to identify new opportunities that had not surfaced through traditional models of product development.

The risks Western Union takes in being more transparent, and engaging with external experts, pay off with opportunities for creating business value and directly addressing social and environmental needs globally.

Case Studies | Monday October 22, 2012

CTIA: Outlining How Wireless Technology Drives Sustainability

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The Challenge

With more than 6 billion mobile phone subscriptions around the world, and more than 100 million (and rapidly growing) machine-to-machine communications, wireless technology is ubiquitous, convenient, and increasingly integrated into our daily lives. Nonetheless, it is not clear how wireless technology has been deployed to enable solutions to longstanding environmental and social problems.

Our Strategy

After consulting with more than 20 wireless industry experts and analyzing data from a wide range of sources, we developed two substantive reports focused on the wireless impacts on the environment and society. In “Wireless and the Environment,” we reviewed the role wireless can play in reducing the environmental footprint of the transportation, utilities, agriculture, and public services sectors. “Socioeconomic Impacts of Wireless Technology” explored the development of wireless technology in society through four lenses: health care, finance, education, and community empowerment.

Both reports noted the growing potential for innovative wireless solutions to improve the environment and societies around the world, such as “smart” wireless traffic-control devices that could reduce emissions by 20 percent, or wireless health care initiatives that dramatically improve access to health care information and could save up to US$2.1 billion annually in the United States alone.

At the same time, the reports call attention to ongoing challenges resulting from the manufacture and use of wireless technology, including the environmental costs of the manufacturing and disposal of products, as well as concerns about privacy, freedom of expression, and supply chain labor rights.

Our Impact

Through discussions among professionals in various fields and presentations of these reports at industry forums, our work has demonstrated some of the possibilities for wireless technology to address human and environmental needs. It has also encouraged a deeper debate about the role of wireless technology in a sustainable society, and it called attention to the need for solutions to ongoing environmental and human rights challenges associated with the production and use of wireless technology.

Lessons Learned

This project highlighted three lessons about the use of technology to support progress in sustainability:

1. Since wireless technology can monitor data at any time and any place, important information can be communicated instantly, enabling more sophisticated resource allocation and providing data-driven evidence to encourage behavior change and operational efficiencies.
2. Collaboration leads to innovation. Combining experts in urban planning with wireless-application developers, for example, can lead to new ideas about using wireless technology to manage and improve traffic flow.
3. New solutions can result in new sustainability risks. Whether it’s protecting the privacy of wirelessly available personal health data or managing the environmental impact of distributed microsensors, the industry should identify and address emerging concerns to ensure that opportunities are not derailed by concerns about impacts.

Case Studies | Monday October 22, 2012

Twin Metals Minnesota: Using Early Stakeholder Engagement to Improve Strategy

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The Challenge

In developing one of the world’s largest underground copper mines—at a site near a popular outdoor recreation area—Twin Metals Minnesota must assure stakeholders and the public that it can mine in a socially and environmentally responsible way.

Although construction of the mine is several years away, Twin Metals sought to develop a meaningful new stakeholder-engagement and community-expectation strategy that would weave sustainability into the cultural fabric of the company, while serving as an effective framework for the company to identify, address, and measure the social and environmental impacts and opportunities of the project.

Our Strategy

BSR worked with Twin Metals to develop a three-part strategy based on early engagement with a broad range of stakeholders:

1. Interview a broad range of stakeholders early. We interviewed stakeholders from local, state, and federal government offices, as well as community leaders and representatives of environmental NGOs. These interviews revealed connections between interrelated stakeholder groups and issues, which helped the company identify opportunities to maximize project benefits for surrounding communities.
2. Incorporate stakeholder interviews into the company’s emerging sustainability strategy. Twin Metals is in the process of building a sustainability strategy from the ground up by incorporating the issues, concerns, and opportunities gleaned from more than 50 stakeholder interviews—ensuring that the company’s strategy will resonate with local communities.
3. Embrace innovation. The stakeholder interview process gave Twin Metals several innovative ways to analyze the social and environmental impacts of the project. For example, we helped identify partnership opportunities for workforce development and local procurement to ensure that local workers are well-trained for technical mining jobs, and that local sourcing of materials is embedded in the company’s strategy. Engagement with environmental NGOs gave the company a more holistic understanding of the environmental issues that are important to these stakeholders and the opportunity to develop more effective mitigation techniques.

Our Impact

By starting the stakeholder-engagement process early—and planning from the outset to incorporate the ideas generated into its sustainability strategy—Twin Metals will be able to build a stronger, more credible strategy. Through this process, the company has identified opportunities and risks early enough to act on them, and the company’s approach is establishing a strong foundation for future collaboration with stakeholders.

Lessons Learned

BSR’s work with Twin Metals revealed that early engagement with a broad range of stakeholders is an essential part of building a strong relationship with stakeholders—especially for a company just launching a sustainability program. Stakeholder views can both strengthen a company’s approach to sustainability and lend credibility to the company within the stakeholder community. This project also demonstrated that it’s possible for stakeholder engagement to provide valuable insight and guidance that will lead to the development of a more sustainable mine.

Case Studies | Monday October 22, 2012

Bradesco: Helping a Brazilian Bank Engage Society on Common Concerns

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The Challenge

In every major economy, the financial sector forms the nexus between stakeholders, investors, and business, making it a potentially valuable enabler of sustainable business. In Brazil, a few banks have started to engage with stakeholders on issues such as financial education, social and environmental risk, climate change, and energy efficiency, but they sometimes struggle with how to address those challenges through their operations.

For Bradesco—an institution with 105,102 employees, 65.4 million clients, 4,636 bank branches, R$789,550 million in total assets, and a presence in every municipality in the country—the challenge was even more pronounced.

The company turned to BSR to help find an answer.

Our Strategy

Our goal was to develop a strategy that consolidated engagement activity across several departments and Bradesco organization’s affiliates in a unified way to inform the company’s direction on sustainability. Key questions included:

• How best to offer banking and insurance services to the more than 50 million people who do not yet have access to financial services?
• How to address risks in the R$5.473 billion of projects monitored by the bank for social environmental impact?
• How best to direct R$566.5 million in social and environmental projects?

We started by assessing the activities already occurring throughout the organization—in retail, insurance, customer services, marketing, corporate, and environmental/social risk assessment—to understand best practices and key challenges.

BSR then worked with Bradesco to design a structured, centralized engagement of external actors to inform how the bank selects and reports on priority issues.

Next, we facilitated two sessions aimed at capturing Bradesco’s impact on business and society. The first session gathered bank executives, client companies exhibiting sustainability leadership, NGOs critical of impacts of major infrastructure projects, and regulatory agencies. Participants provided practical suggestions to inform the organization’s strategy on key issues: They suggested key performance indicators for assessing financial institutions, and they identified ways to connect sustainability issues within the strategy.

In our second session, managers from different areas across the bank met with specialists to discuss specific solutions to financial inclusion, social/environmental risk, governance and transparency, client relations, climate change, and strategic social investment.

Our Impact

Based on these workshops and BSR’s research, Bradesco will create working groups involving bank executives to advance sustainability solutions within their operations. The company’s sustainability committee will use the engagement process BSR helped create to regularly assess performance.

As a result of these changes, Bradesco has already received praise from NGOs and other stakeholders, who applauded the company for its commitment to "treating [sustainability challenges] internally as opposed to a one-off conversation." The process has also been praised by internal participants as “the most open discussion on real challenges important to our future success.”

Lessons Learned

We learned two main lessons from our work:

• To achieve sustainability goals, banks must build the organizational capabilities that allow for these external signals to influence the company’s direction.
• An essential step in our engagement approach was securing buy-in at the organization’s highest levels and developing a process that involves all areas of the bank.

Case Studies | Monday October 22, 2012

The Boeing Company: Assessing the Maturity of Environmental Systems

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The Challenge

As the world's largest aerospace company, whose commercial jetliners and defense, space, and security systems are used in 150 countries, Boeing operates a diverse network of manufacturing facilities that produce and maintain aircraft and aviation systems. In today’s operating environment, the company faces growing pressure from customers and reporting standards to quickly aggregate common data from across its manufacturing sites and report on its overall environmental performance.

Additionally, Boeing’s five-year environmental targets focus on key impacts, including carbon-dioxide emissions, energy use, water use, and waste. The company was on track to meet or exceed its 1 percent absolute reduction goals, which were set to expire in 2012, and Boeing needed to develop a comprehensive set of new targets. Additionally, given the steady increase in requests for corporate sustainability information from surveys, analysts, and customers, the company wanted to ensure that new targets could satisfy future data needs.

Boeing enlisted BSR to help develop its next set of performance targets and assess the viability and usefulness of the company’s current data, and the systems underlying environmental management at the various manufacturing sites.

Our Strategy

Our goal was to understand the state of Boeing’s environmental data across key manufacturing sites, and whether these data were “mature,” or robust, useful, and forward-looking enough to satisfy emerging sustainability data requirements. BSR and Boeing also created a “maturity model” to assess governance of environmental data across manufacturing sites.

We gathered this information by reviewing management systems documentation and holding a series of meetings with facility and corporate environmental leaders at multiple sites. We also interviewed select manufacturing peers within the BSR member network to understand their approaches to environmental data governance. Based on this, we facilitated a discussion with senior management about the development of new targets, highlighting where Boeing could set ambitious targets verses where continuous improvement to systems and processes could be made to address future needs.

Our Impact

Our work produced a more detailed understanding of how environmental data varied across Boeing sites, the maturity of environmental governance, and the company’s readiness for increasing the scope of its existing environmental metrics. Boeing developed a set of post-2012 environmental targets based on this new understanding.

Lessons Learned

• By assessing the maturity of the data, we were able to highlight both the gaps and the opportunities for future reporting needs.
• Traditional environmental, health, and safety data; systems; and processes need to shift to an overall sustainability framework—one that is future-looking and takes into account stakeholder needs.
• Boeing has relatively standardized data and processes to collect that information, and this is supported by strong management systems. Nonetheless, variation in data still exists. Potential benefits of data maturity include:
  • Reputation/brand enhancement and risk reduction: Better, more proactive responses to public reporting and customer environmental data requests can reduce risk.
  • Streamlined operations: Standardized, centralized, and automated data systems improve access, reduce duplication, and simplify monitoring.
  • Opportunity identification: Tracking and highlighting opportunities can further reduce impacts such as waste.
  • Improved best-practice sharing: Improving internal communications makes it easier for sites to track and compare each other’s performance.

Case Studies | Monday October 22, 2012

Helping Companies Ensure Respect for Human Rights

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The Challenge

Ever since BSR was founded, we have been working with business to address human rights impacts, from labor rights abuses in global supply chains to freedom of expression on the internet.

Though human rights is not a new challenge to business, one of the big obstacles has been a lack of consensus and clarity on the exact responsibilities of business and a dearth of resources to help companies meet those responsibilities.

After UN Special Representative John Ruggie’s Protect, Respect, Remedy Framework provided that consensus in 2008, BSR supported Ruggie’s UN mandate to help find answers to the next question: How companies can ensure that they do not infringe upon human rights?

Our Strategy

As Ruggie and his team set out to develop the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, our support for their work was based on three objectives:

1. Share BSR’s experience and perspective with the UN mandate to help shape the principles.
2. Connect the UN mandate with BSR member companies to enable mutual learning.
3. Help companies implement human rights strategies and management systems aligned with the principles.

BSR provided input to the UN mandate as a stakeholder at in-person and online consultations, and we hosted representatives from the UN mandate at in-person events in Tokyo and Hong Kong and at virtual events for our members in North America and EMEA. These events covered topics such as human rights strategy, due diligence, and grievance mechanisms.

We also hosted Ruggie and his team at the annual BSR Conferences to share their thinking and gather business leaders’ perspectives on what does and does not work when managing human rights impacts.

Most importantly, we held several cross-industry and sector-specific workshops for our members, and we worked one on one with companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Teck Resources, and Telefonica to develop human rights policies and management systems. After the Guiding Principles were published, we developed sector-specific assessment frameworks and strategic guidance, such as our 2011 report on applying the Guiding Principles in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector.

Our Impact

Since 2008, we have worked with companies in the ICT, extractives, energy, media, consumer products, automotive, and financial sectors on how to implement the Guiding Principles. In May of 2012, we launched the BSR Human Rights Working Group. In all of our work, we use the UN Guiding Principles as a baseline for companies, but we also go “beyond respect,” helping companies identify opportunities to use their core competencies to help advance human rights.

Lessons Learned

A key lesson we draw from this work is the importance of collaboration when addressing complex challenges. The UN mandate’s inclusive stakeholder engagement approach led to a global consensus in an area that as recently as 2005 saw almost complete disagreement between business and human rights groups.

We also learned that while the human rights risks faced by each industry are very different and require unique responses, many sectors share common management challenges. For example, a mining company obligated to use an abusive military force to protect its mine, and an ICT company required by local law to filter human rights content from online searches face the same challenge: how to effectively use their limited leverage over the government to change the negative behavior.