Rather than traditional one-off social audits, Engaged offers to develop a continuing social achievement mapping engagement across the supply chain that will aim at:

  • Providing a goal-based map of ethical trading achievements over time. This “social achievement map” (SAM) will outline minimum base ethical performance that the factory commits itself to, and progressing to aspirational measures (among others, those that have been raised as “continuing improvement” or best practices) over time.
  • Facilitate suppliers in “making sense” out of corrective actions and social audits by collaborating on root-cause analyses and participatory internal monitoring schemes that can inform them of continuing problem areas and risks to their ethical trade performance.
  • Facilitate suppliers in designing an impact-tracking programme with worker participation.

SAM Programme Components

Engaged proposes to assist the supplier in the development and implementation of a programme of progressive supplier empowerment beyond social compliance.  The Social Achievement Mapping process seeks to define the following core programme components for building an inclusive, transparent and impact-driven facility:

  1. WHAT WE BELIEVE IN

This policy statement defines the labour and ethical goals that a supplier is committed to and reflects a company’s mission and vision as an ethical business partner.

  1. WHO WE ARE

This supply chain-mapping phase works to complete its Supply Chain Structure of:

  • Known and unknown supply chain tiers upstream
  • Primary and secondary dependencies based on manufacturing and business links
  • Approximate size of workers (including subcontractors, indirect workforces, etc.) involved.

The supply chain map needs to correspond as accurately as possible to manufacturing and sourcing patterns.

  1. WHERE WE ARE NOW

SAM allows for continuing needs and priority assessments in the supplier facility.  It is intended to be a self-assessing and progressive goal-setting mechanism that transfers the traditional auditing services provided by third-party monitors and clients to the supplier itself.  This transfer of ownership is completed through the use and guarantee of:

  • Empowered worker representatives as the best monitors of workplace conditions and the best linkage for identifying workers’ needs
  • Empowered human resources managers and staff as core to the implementation of ethical business practices that are embedded into how a supplier’s business is run.
  • Empowered supplier management as the best feedback on improving purchasing practices and how collaborative CSR promotion can be achieved.

Some examples:

  1. Setting worker representative mechanisms and structures
  2. Review of HR social management systems
  3. Empowerment-building sessions for worker representatives and HR social compliance management systems owners by Engaged with supplier’s supply chain

The above three components need to be in place before the formal SAM roadmap tiers for social achievements can be undertaken.