Continuous worker voice - less work
Updated: Sep 1
Most ethical sourcing or responsible purchasing teams at retailers and brands ("Sponsors") are running flat out.
And there is more work on the way - recent changes to regulations and laws now require labour rights due diligence to move beyond data collection.
Today's watchwords are:
Meaningful stakeholder engagement
Dialogue with workers
Worker welfare
Decent work for all workers
All of this points towards increased engagement with workers and some form of "worker voice".
Whilst this sounds like more work:
continuous worker voice can be less work for hard-pressed labour rights due diligence teams
Properly implemented and sensibly run, continuous worker voice can significantly reduce the work involved in labour rights due diligence, whilst also enabling the focus of due diligence to change from data collection to worker welfare.
There are two separate sources of savings for labour rights monitoring teams:
Savings that come from continuous worker voice - the subject of this post.
Savings that come from Ask The Workers specifically - covered in a companion post: Ask The Workers - less work.
Summary
As you will read from the two posts, continuous worker voice delivers cost savings in 5 main ways.
Continuous worker voice:
allows retailers and brands to have a more passive role since they no longer have to adjudicate remedy-success - monitoring in the background is much easier than actively driving change via corrective action plans;
supports a reduction in scope and frequency of social audits, allowing auditors to focus on areas where social audit is strong, whilst better covering the other areas where social audit can be weak;
enables the workers to police their labour rights themselves, removing the need for corrective action plans with the follow up and evidence gathering that is involved;
avoids the start-stop of surveys, and enables questions to be varied by workplace and changed at any time, which means that follow-up is just the next question and not a whole new survey; and
avoids conflicts of interests via the Ask The Workers "collect-once, share-many-times" licensing model, and all without interruption to working time at suppliers.
Savings in social audits
Worker voice (continuous or periodic) is not a replacement for social audits:
Workers report their views - which are not "facts", and where findings are indicated, further investigations would normally be required;
Workers can only comment on matters within their competence and this covers a large spectrum of labour rights issues but not everything; workers cannot comment, for example, on whether buildings are safe or certified to be safe.
But worker voice is great partner for social audit:
Worker voice is strong where social audit tends to be weak - understanding whether the daily lived experience of workers means they are actually receiving decent work.
Continuous worker voice (rather than survey) can enable the frequency and scope of audits to be reduced, and reduce verification of much of the follow-up remedial work that audits generate.
How worker voice partners with social audit is covered here in depth and in this specific blog post: here, and also note the potential problems that are inherent in using worker feedback collected in social audits here.
Periodic surveys have a heavy overhead
Think about what actually happens around a worker survey — not the fieldwork, but everything wrapped around it.
Someone convenes a meeting to decide what to ask.
The questions get drafted, reviewed, translated and signed off.
The survey has to be scheduled with the sites in scope, which means negotiating a window, briefing management, and arranging access.
Someone has to police the survey so that responses aren't coached or filtered.
Results come back that have to be collated, cleaned and analysed.
A report gets written. The report gets read.
A meeting is convened to discuss the findings and follow-up actions.
Some months later, the whole cycle starts again from the top.
Very little of that is worker voice. Almost all of it is the overhead of starting and stopping.
Continuous worker voice removes the stop-start entirely. The channel is always open, so there is no mobilisation, no scheduling, no fieldwork window, no collation phase and no waiting for the next cycle to test whether something has changed.
Continuous worker voice - implement once, use forever
Translation, localisation, worker onboarding and channel design are set-up costs, not recurring costs. This reduces costs for workplaces as well as Sponsors. Any changes then needed going forward (eg: changes to questions) ride on infrastructure that already exists and is already live.
The overhead doesn't get optimised; it stops existing.
Asking the right questions becomes easy
A survey is based on questions that are usually pre-defined and asked once - on site when the process happens.
Your question set, whether asked as a survey or via interviews, is a one-shot decision.
If you miss something, ask it badly, or find that an answer raises an obvious next question, you carry that gap until the next survey — which might be twelve months away. Question design is critical and the cost of getting it wrong is high.
Moreover, the overhead of survey design can also lead to a "one-size-fits-all" approach where all workplaces get the same questions even if there are differences between workplaces that should be taken into account.
With continuous worker voice, questions can be changed at any time and easily varied by workplace.
The pressure and the cost both disappear. You don't need to anticipate everything up front. You ask, you see what comes back, and if the answers point somewhere unexpected you adjust the questions.
Follow-up isn't another survey - it's just the next question.
This is a quiet but significant saving. A lot of the effort in traditional due diligence goes into de-risking a decision that continuous worker voice makes reversible.
The Sponsor role can move from active to passive
The "Sponsor" (retailer, brand, construction company, landlord etc) are the commercial third party with leverage who is interested in the labour rights experience of workers that they don't directly employ.
Under an audit model, the Sponsor carries the burden of proof.
A finding is raised
A corrective action plan is written
Evidence of remedy is requested
Documented evidence is reviewed
And someone has to decide whether the evidence is sufficient and that the provided remedy will sustain.
This is active management, and it rests on a fundamentally awkward premise:
Without continuous worker voice, the Sponsor drives root cause diagnosis and the remedy path, and adjudicates whether a problem in a workplace has actually been fixed
Continuous worker voice places workers front and centre in reporting if they receive decent work.
Workers report areas of satisfaction and dissatisfaction and they continue to report if improvements have been provided and whether improvements are sustained. This is a natural consequence of workers continuously providing feedback about their labour rights experience.
And because they can say so at any time, the verification happens on its own, including the cases that matter most and that audits are poor at detecting - periodic issues or events that occur outside the audit window or which are seemingly remedied but then re-occur.
With continuous worker voice, workers police their labour rights themselves
The sponsor's job shifts from chasing evidence to watching a signal. That is a passive role, and passive roles are cheap to run.
Continuous worker voice is less work
Continuous worker voice sounds like more work because "continuous" sounds like more.
What's continuous is the listening. The work is less.
Everything above comes from running continuously rather than in cycles.
But a continuous platform can still be built in ways that hand the work straight back to you - and most of the remaining savings come from design decisions that are not automatic at all. That is the subject of the second half of this story: Ask The Workers - less work.
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