What’s Next? Building on a Corporate-Level Human Rights Assessment

Key Points

• A Human Rights Assessment (HRA) is the foundation, not a finish line. The real impact comes from embedding its findings into everyday operations, governance, and strategy.
• Stakeholders expect ongoing due diligence. From regulatory expectations to investor-led pressure, it is clear that stakeholders expect companies to embrace the concept of ongoing human rights and environmental due diligence.
• Momentum matters. The months following an HRA are the ideal time to build alignment, prioritize action, and set the tone for ongoing accountability.

Completing a corporate-level human rights assessment (HRA) is a significant milestone. It provides clarity on a company’s salient human rights risks across its entire value chain, helps to address stakeholder expectations, and grounds a company’s policy commitments in credible evidence. While the scope and depth of a corporate-level HRA vary depending on objectives, its value is consistent: it simplifies a complex landscape into a clear roadmap for action. It also offers a defensible rationale for prioritizing where to focus deeper due diligence, aligning with the growing expectations of investors, regulators, civil society, and human rights benchmarks. 

However, an HRA is not the finish line. It is the beginning of a process to transform insights into an ongoing due diligence cycle that delivers meaningful outcomes for people and measurable results for the business. Leading companies distinguish themselves not by completing a single assessment, but by building on it—focusing on the most severe risks, designing operating models that scale, measuring progress against defined indicators, and using grievance and remedy mechanisms as engines for continuous learning. 

This approach is increasingly codified in global standards and regulation. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises emphasize that due diligence must be continuous. Emerging regulations, including what was formerly referred to as the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) formalize this expectation, requiring companies to identify and assess impacts, take action, track effectiveness, and report results on an ongoing basis. 

From a Corporate-Level HRA to Action: Six Key Workstreams 

There is no single formula for what comes after a corporate-level HRA. However, based on BSR’s experience supporting companies to design and deliver robust assessments as part of broader human rights due diligence, six priority workstreams consistently emerge. These workstreams show how companies can move from a one-time assessment to a fully embedded, ongoing due diligence process—one that not only manages risk but also delivers sustained impact for people and the business. 

1. Deep-Dive Human Rights Impact Assessments (HRIA) Where it Matters Most: A corporate-level HRA helps identify where risks are most severe in the value chain, guiding targeted deep dives—by site (a country or facility), issue (e.g., forced labor, freedom of association), product/customer (high-leverage relationships), or moment in time (market entry, acquisition, supply shocks). HRIAs are carried out from the perspective of rightsholders, providing real-time insights that strengthen mitigation strategies and support effective remediation planning in line with the expectations set by the UNGPs, OECD Guidelines, and various regulatory requirements. 
2. Strategy Development: Corporate-level HRAs establish a company’s overall risk and impact profile, highlighting salient issues and management gaps. Acting on these findings requires developing a clear strategy for managing and integrating human rights into business operations, supported by short-, medium-, and long-term goals. A well-defined strategy aligns priorities, ensures sustained action to mitigate and remediate impacts, embeds changes into the business model, and builds the capacity needed to address human rights challenges effectively. 
3. Monitoring and Reporting: Following a corporate-level HRA, define goals and KPIs that align with both stakeholder and regulatory expectations. Stakeholder pressure on reporting after assessments and due diligence is growing, from regulators, investors, and beyond. Companies should therefore prepare for increased disclosure of human rights assessment outcomes, more issue-specific reports for well-defined audiences on the most severe impacts, and where appropriate, full publication of HRIAs. Those that move beyond one-off assessments to adopt a transparent, continuous due diligence approach will be best placed to meet growing reporting expectations from stakeholders and regulators alike. 
4. Integration: The findings from a corporate-level HRA should not remain on the shelf—they need to be embedded into the company’s daily operations. This means updating relevant policies, procedures, and practices, and developing targeted mitigation and remedy action plans. Beyond this, socializing these concepts and changes with relevant teams and focusing on integrating human rights considerations into day-to-day activities is a critical step for successful, long-term change. Integration turns the HRA from a one-off exercise into a living process, improving visibility over human rights risks, strengthening management, and enabling progress tracking. 
5. Training: To maximize impact, employees need the skills and knowledge to understand salient human rights impacts, identify potential issues in their daily work, and adapt to updated processes. Targeted, role-specific training raises awareness, builds capability, and ensures timely and effective responses when risks arise. 
6. Corporate-Level HRA Refresh: Plan a refresh every 4-5 years, or sooner, when there are material changes to the business that can impact the company’s footprint and risk profile.  

A corporate-level HRA is the starting point of a journey, not its end. The months after completing the assessment are critical for building momentum—continuing to engage team members that were interviewed or consulted as part of the HRA process, embedding findings into operations, establishing clear strategies, training teams, and more. This is how companies shift from a snapshot in time to a continuous, credible human rights due diligence process. 

The steps outlined above—deep-diving HRIAs, strategy development, monitoring and reporting, integration, training, and periodic refresh—are proven ways to transform insight into action. Taken together, they help companies strengthen risk management, meet rising stakeholder and regulatory expectations, and most importantly, deliver positive outcomes for people affected by business activities. 

BSR supports companies at every stage of this process. From conducting the initial corporate-level HRA to building the governance structures, tools, and capabilities needed for ongoing due diligence, BSR brings sector expertise, a global perspective, and a practical focus on solutions that teams can implement and sustain. 

For companies ready to move beyond assessment into sustained action, now is the time to set the tone, align leadership, and embed human rights due diligence into everyday business. BSR can help make that transition clear, strategic, and impactful.  

If you are considering launching a corporate-level HRA or deciding what should come next, we encourage you to reach out to BSR’s Human Rights team.

This article was originally published at the BSR website "Sustainability Insights" and is written by Manuela Corredor Vasquez, Manager, Human Rights and EETI & Salah Husseini, Director, Human Rights,  at BSR.