This bulletin was published on 17 March 2023
Retail giants collaborate with Everyone’s Business on the relaunch of their human rights app

Retail giants collaborate with Everyone’s Business on the relaunch of their human rights app

  • Everyone’s Business is an app and toolkit set up to help train staff on how to spot human rights concerns, and make it easy for them to raise any issues with in-house experts

  • Initially developed for garment and footwear manufacturing alongside four leading brands – Next, M&S, Pentland and Sainsbury’s – this relaunch of the app now covers four of the biggest sectors in the world: garment, pharma, building materials, and food and farming

  • As well as enabling companies to easily report human rights issues to their in-house experts, Everyone’s Business is a training tool, allowing companies to target their training more effectively, as well as measure staff’s engagement by tracking use of the app in the field.

Today Everyone’s Business launch the next phase of the app, adding a food and farming module.

The new module adds a fourth sector specific focus for the app, alongside our Garment & Footwear, Pharmaceutical, and Building Materials modules.

As with the other modules, the Everyone’s Business team worked with in-house experts with on-the-ground experience to develop the questions, county guides and top tips for visits. Those experts come from two leading retailers, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose, and two major food suppliers, Döhler and Hortifrut.

This new module will allow food retailers and their suppliers to support ongoing training of staff on how to spot human rights concerns during site visits, and a mechanism to then report any issues easily and confidentially to expert teams back home.

Often, the members of staff visiting sites most frequently, do not have direct human rights expertise or knowledge. These could be designers working on a new product or technical assessing quality or processes, for example. The app provides these staff with prompts and guidance that they can employ when walking around the site, allowing them to spot any concerns that may normally be unclear to the untrained eye.

Relaunched late last year, Everyone’s Business now has 15 registered companies, 600 users, and over 1000 visits completed, with 600 issues being reported back to expert teams.

This version of the app includes a re-design of the dashboard, a new tiered pricing structure, and more sector-specific modules for pharma, building materials, and, most recently, food and farm. It has enhanced functionality, interface and user experience – making it even more engaging for its users. Each sector-specific module was built alongside a group of ethical trade and responsible sourcing experts from that sector.

For ethical trade teams, the app is fully flexible, enabling teams to set their own alerts based on what’s important to them – these could be specific responses (or numbers of responses), issues by country, or issues by supplier.

The new pricing structure also includes a simpler, free version, to give smaller brands and suppliers the capability to identify and address human rights risks in their own supply chains.

“The Everyone’s Business app enables companies to raise awareness of human rights issues amongst staff and empower them to share their concerns. It provides simple ways for issues to be raised quickly and allows ethical trade teams to set their own parameters around specific risk triggers.”

– Will Pickett of Carnstone, the team behind Everyone’s Business

Users of Everyone’s Business come from companies leading on human rights, including Marshalls, The Very Group, M&S and Sainsbury’s, advancing responsible supply chains. The app offers a unique opportunity to provide staff with guidance as they visit a site.

Click here to learn more.
Please contact Everyone’s Business at info@everyones.business if you have any questions.

About Everyone’s Business

Everyone’s Business is a human rights toolkit to help train staff on what to look for, and to allow them to be able to raise any issues of concern with internal expert functions (human rights/ethical trade) back home.

The app was developed by Carnstone, a sustainability consultancy, with help from four leading companies: M&S, Pentland, Next and Sainsbury’s.

The aim here is to make human rights everyone’s business, keeping key staff aware and updated, and using all of those supplier touch points as an informal and light touch due diligence check.