Sharing worker data
- timnicolle7
- May 15
- 6 min read
Md Asif [name changed] runs a large garment factory servicing five international brands.
His business is spread across a large site just north of Dhaka in Bangladesh. He supports most brands with a dedicated team overseeing their production and IP, each team occupying their own floor (or three) in one of the factory buildings.
Times have been good for the business with increasing volumes, albeit price pressures continue. There are many things to complain about. He still remembers the expensive US-made and certified fire doors he had to buy because of the compliance rules brought in by the Alliance after Rana Plaza.
But customer-required, worker-human-rights due diligence processes are now becoming a constant annoyance that interrupts production and is costing him real money. And real money costs means he has no choice but to increase his FOB customer prices, since his margins are so low.
He is suffering from audit and app fatigue.
Every customer has its own approach to worker-rights due diligence.
Of course his brand customers need to know that his factory complies with all the relevant laws and that his operational environments are safe. And that means he has to maintain a dedicted team at his end to manage the data flow, any issues being raised, actions being taken. That's okay - it's not a big deal.
But the most significant cost is from surveys. This disturbs production and often involves apps and calls and interruptions that reduce efficiency and undermine morale.
Surely there's a better way?
What does worker human rights due diligence look like to a supplier?
From Mr Asif's point of view, this whole area looks complicated with well-meaning but over-engineered processes that largely fail to deliver good data to his customers. He's not sure where all this is going.
In the past, it was fine - he would pay for an annual SMETA audit report which brands would access via their membership in one of the audit-sharing groups; and that worked.
But in the last few years its all gone a bit mad.
Most brands now want to contract their own audit directly, and then they also want to follow up with their own bespoke survey of workers.
Surveys are the worst - because this can involve a large number of workers that have to be taken off the production line. Workers need the survey process explained to them each time and each one is different with a slightly different model. Then, instead of working, they get a few hours away from the line to answer a series of questions, either using an app on their phone or even sometimes with humans calling them.
And when this is happening nearly every month and impacting large groups of workers, the cost to the business and to worker morale becomes very noticeable.
What's difficult about sharing worker data?
First of all, it is important to note that raw worker data itself is never shared. The responses workers give should be collected without requiring workers to identify themselves, and their responses should remain confidential.
We are talking about sharing reports, analysis and dashboards based on that raw worker data.
And then, we can see three main problems:
Who pays?
Managing confidentiality
Reporting cycles
Who pays is a problem because brand A does not want to pay for a survey and find that brands B, C and D all get to use the result for free. That's not fair. - but then Mr Asif doesn't want to arrange and pay for the survey himself because this leads to the same conflict of interest problem that can undermine the validity of social audits.
Confidentiality is a sensitive topic. What if workers report that there is an issue? Brands generally want to control everything.
And every brand has its own reporting cycle - usually tied into their own corporate governance processes and publication dates for their reports. Surveys don't work like that - and they go out of date.
Ask the workers - delivering data sharing
"Ask the workers" has cracked this problem.
Our unique approach naturally delivers the right result for the brands, the workers and the factory.
One platform for worker data, share with everyone
Who pays for the process of collecting data from workers and analysing it?
With Ask the workers, we pay.
We cover the cost of collecting data and running the infrastructure involved.
We charge stakeholders (like brands) to see reports and dashboards based on the worker data, and the costs are low because of the efficiency of our approach and the fact that outputs can be shared (see here: https://www.es3g.com/plans-pricing).
Confidentiality concerns and requirements are addressed.
With Ask the workers, workers own the data that they provide, licensing it to us so that we can produce real-time reports and dashboards.
We do not have data from the brand or the workplace in our platform. All the underlying data that we manage comes from the workers.
Each workplace controls which brands can see our reports and dashboards based on the worker data collected.
The fact that a brand may have access to our dashboards and reports is confidential - there's no visibility of this fact via our platform, other than to the workplace involved.
Data is always real-time because Ask the workers is continuous (it's not a survey):
That means all the different reporting cycles of the brands are handled naturally.
Ask the workers is implemented once and then simply runs all the time, with workers providing data every day on how their worker-human-rights are being respected.
So there is always real-time data available when a brand wants it.
What do the lawyers say?
Our approach is documented in a simple licence agreement that is available on our website (the link is in the website footer - you can also click here).
Our licence agreement has been reviewed many times - and it works.
In this one agreement, we manage all of the different kinds of user, including workers, and how their access to data collected from workers is organised.
Ask the workers is different and this has required a new approach to the legal model.
You will get a tick-in-the-box from legal and compliance!
This is a game-changer
Ask the workers, for the first time, delivers an operational model enabling worker data to be collected continuously and shared confidentially and usefully with multiple brands.
The legal model used here for Ask the workers is one that could be replicated for social audit with some adjustments. Do call us if you would like to discuss what this might look like.
Getting back to Mr Asif - he's embracing what Ask the workers can deliver for him.
First of all, there's no charge from us to his business or to his workers.
Second, the app is implemented once and then it simply runs continuously. There is no start-stop-start that is so expensive for his teams to manage.
Third, the app is so simple and quick to use, that he can reasonably ask workers not to respond during working hours. Moreover workers are separately compensated for doing this via the Ask the workers prize draw system. But most importantly, this means that there's no interruption to production.
And finally, he's able to provide real-time data to all his customers direct from the workers themselves - achieving a new level of transparent, effective and authentic data flow in place of an endless procession of surveys.
One platform for worker data, share with everyone
We have been hearing from a number of brands that the ability to share worker data to reduce the cost to monitoring to suppliers and workers is very much needed. So, if you would like to know more about how continuous workplace monitoring via our Ask the workers app works or have a discussion about the legal and compliance issues that we are addressing, please get in touch.
These are new and developing topics for Business and for us - we are very interested in feedback and discussion to learn more about how organisations are looking at policy and procedure in this area.
Workers tell us, so we can tell you. Ask the workers.
Here are some links and external resources that we have drawn on for this blog:
https://www.just-style.com/interviews/wrap-ceo-esg-legislation-could-eradicate-social-audit-fatigue/ [note: this article is behind a paywall]
and something for the lawyers on data trusts, but an approach that we should probably aim to avoid here - but it does show why data sharing can be a challenge:
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