We’re proud to reaffirm our commitment to human rights through our updated Global Human Rights Guidelines. This serves as the third iteration of our commitment to protecting human rights across our business, operations and supply chain since we published our first set of guidelines in 2015. These guidelines reflect how our founding principles of integrity, honesty, fairness, respect and reliability are reflected in our proactive approach to risk management and engagement on human rights topics with employees, suppliers, clients, panelists and others. We will also be providing optional internal training for associates to learn more about how protecting human rights is part of everyone’s job.
“Trust and accountability are at the core of who we are as a company,” said George Callard, Chief Legal Officer, Nielsen. “We are committed to respecting human rights in all that we do across our business, operations and supply chain, and this respect is critical to our ability to deliver the best results for our clients. Our commitment extends across the clients we proudly serve, the communities in which we live and work, our employees and supply chain, as well as the consumers who share their information with us.”
We proactively engage our internal and external stakeholders to better understand their views and recommendations in order to incorporate an informed respect for human rights throughout all aspects of Nielsen’s business. Our approach is aligned with external standards and best practices in a number of specific ways, including respect for the individual; care for our communities; nurturing a diverse and inclusive environment; and safeguarding our meritocracy, among others.
All Nielsen leaders are responsible for ensuring that our practices demonstrate a commitment to human rights. Functional responsibility for managing, monitoring and tracking the potential human rights impacts and risks of our business and operations is managed across a variety of functions, including: Procurement, Operations, Corporate Audit, Human Resources, Diversity & Inclusion, Global Responsibility & Sustainability, Legal & Corporate Affairs, Finance, and others. Each functional group contributes its own unique expertise and competencies to ensuring that relevant human rights risks are addressed or incorporated into existing policies or practices if and as needed. Our Integrity Leader program is one such functional group with responsibility in this area. This group is composed of regional Integrity Leaders and Integrity Ambassadors throughout the organization.
Human rights is also embedded in our overall approach to Risk Management through our Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) framework. This multi-channel collaboration allows us to take a more comprehensive and proactive approach to human rights risk management. ERM ensures that we are conducting ongoing, in-depth assessments through our existing due diligence processes, monitoring and reporting on these risks, taking appropriate actions when needed to address the risks, and integrating any relevant findings into our organizational processes and policies as needed.
We will continue to explore new ways of furthering our commitment to human rights around the world through these and other stakeholder engagement efforts. We commit to ongoing and regular engagement of our internal and external stakeholders and to incorporate their views and recommendations into our global policies and practices.
For more information about Nielsen’s approach to human rights-related risks and opportunities, please refer to our Nielsen Global Responsibility Report.
