At this year’s UN Responsible Business and Human Rights Forum, I spoke about how benchmarking is more than a buzzword—it is becoming a practical tool to drive corporate accountability and improve human rights performance.
From my perspective at the World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA), I see how benchmarking benefits different stakeholders in distinct ways:
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For companies: It serves as a roadmap, revealing gaps, enabling peer comparisons, and pointing to areas where capacity-building is needed.
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For civil society: It provides credible, comparable evidence to strengthen advocacy, campaigning, and policy engagement.
Key Benefits and Challenges
One of the most valuable aspects of benchmarking is its ability to uncover “unknown unknowns”—issues companies may never have considered disclosing or acting on. At the same time, benchmarking can be misused if businesses focus on scoring rather than substance, which is why civil society oversight is so important.
The Asian Context
In Asia, while SMEs dominate the economy, large multinational companies - many headquartered here -play a significant role. Benchmarks apply the same standards to all companies globally, avoiding “lower bars” for regional contexts. However, a persistent challenge is large brands pushing human rights risks down their supply chains without supporting suppliers to meet those standards.
Access to Remedy Gaps
Our latest WBA data shows both progress and ongoing gaps in grievance mechanisms:
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91% of companies have mechanisms for workers.
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76% extend these to communities and supply chain workers.
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Yet only 5% involve stakeholders in designing these mechanisms, and just 10% build co-ownership undermining trust and reducing use.
Without trust, workers and communities are less likely to raise concerns early, which means opportunities for resolution are often lost.
Civil Society’s Role
Civil society can use benchmarking to:
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Support policy advocacy in countries like Thailand, Japan, South Korea, and India.
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Strengthen campaigns with robust, comparable evidence.
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Conduct localized assessments using WBA’s free, open methodology.
Looking Ahead
I believe we need to move from process-based metrics to outcome-based measures over the next five years. We are also exploring how technology and AI can make data analysis more effective while maintaining transparency and sensitivity to local contexts.
My core takeaway: Benchmarking is only as powerful as the action it inspires. Real change happens when companies embed commitments into daily practice, engage stakeholders meaningfully, and measure success by outcomes—not just processes.
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