There are some very exciting upgrades and methodology breakthroughs - our news for Q1 2025.
Read on for 2 more minutes to get update on what we have developed.
It's essential reading for:
anyone active in the field of worker human rights due diligence, and
anyone who has an interest in the prevention of "modern slavery" and other harms that can affect workers in businesses and their supply chains.
Supporting a survey approach
Our platform runs continuously. This is a huge advantage over survey-based approaches:
Set up once and let it run
Automatically tells you whether remedy is working in real-time
Encourages workplaces to self-remedy (they correct reported issues without intervention)
Discourages poor treatment of workers (as the platform's mere presence can be sufficient)
Costs (direct and indirect) are much lower than surveys
Harder for workers to be coached and coaching is easier to detect
There's no "start-stop-start" like a survey or periods when there is no data being provided.
It is all the workers, all the time.
But we recognise that most companies will prefer to think about human rights due diligence using a "survey-style" approach. This is convenient and fits the principle of "check - analyse - diagnose - remedy" that most teams are used to.
So a survey is a short period of intensive monitoring, followed by a check point, a report, root cause diagnosis, remedy design and then remedy delivery. A further intensive reporting cycle should then follow later (eg: after 6 months) in order to check that remedy has been delivered and accepted.
Our Ask the workers platform can easily support this approach because we have now built in:
the concept of a reporting cycle based on a period of more intense monitoring that has a checkpoint at the end (like a survey), and
the ability for stakeholders to ramp up the platform and ramp it down again with their worker communities in order to vary the intensity of reporting over time.
New dashboards, new methodologies
We have also been working hard with clients and our human rights team to upgrade how results are analysed and presented.
Averages are dangerous and potentially misleading
We see, across the industry, that average scores can often be used to measure both:
how workers are treated at a point in time, and
the extent to which there is progress over time.
For example, dashboards and reports might say:
95% of female workers say that they do not experience sexual harassment at work, and
that's improved from last month when it was 92%.
Yay!
But this is troubling.
Just think - when 95% of female workers say that they do not experience harassment, it also means that 5% of female workers do. If there are 1,000 workers in the population, that's 50 workers that are reporting sexual harassment.
95% is not a good result, nor is it a very useful number.
The use of averages can hide problems and provide false confidence.
Better methods are required to identify where issues may exist in order to develop root cause diagnosis and deliver remedy.
We have developed a number of techniques that are now implemented into our dashboards that provide stakeholders with the ability to dig better into the data without using misleading averages - reducing the opportunities to build up a false sense of confidence and miss important risks.
Nothing is perfect, of course - but we need to recognise and avoid the dangers of an overly-simplistic approach.
Here's an example upgraded Ask the workers dashboard:
Ask the workers - our new brand
Many of you know us as "ES3G". This is the name of our company and it has been our trading name for the last few years.
"Ask the workers, all the workers, all the time".
ES3G Limited is still the name of our business - but our branding is switching to our new trading name "Ask the workers".
What next?
Please do share the news about Ask the workers and encourage colleagues and contacts to join our mailing lists and participate in the discussion!
You can do that easily by clicking this link here and just sending us an email (no need for a message). We will pick this up.
We have a lot to say!
Continuous monitoring is a breakthrough - now available at scale and supported by some of the world's leading experts in the protection of worker rights.
Get in touch to find out more - book a call.
Comments