BASF – cutting through complexity to deliver a clear gap analysis and action plan

Overview

There are 111,000 employees in the BASF Group, working across 6 segments: Chemicals, Materials, Industrial Solutions, Surface Technologies, Nutrition & Care and Agricultural Solutions. It generated sales of around €78 billion in 2021.

We partnered with BASF to conduct a comprehensive human rights gap analysis by reviewing their existing human rights due diligence mechanisms, key risk areas and training needs. The project included a full internal stakeholder engagement process from country to executive level and focused strategy workshops to align on the improvement measures and agree the action plan.

The challenge

BASF “commit to respect human rights in our operations and embrace the responsibility to foster respect for human rights in relationships with our business partners along the value chain, with neighbours in communities, and in the application of our products”. To support this commitment, we were asked to review BASF’s Human Rights Due Diligence approach, define the next steps of development and how to get there. This involved engaging senior leaders from Country to President level to explore how human rights were potentially affected by their everyday and strategic business decisions.

Our approach

As a large and complex business, it was important to agree and prioritise the data requirements for the gap analysis from the start, along with the list of 40 internal stakeholders to be interviewed. We worked with the human rights and compliance teams to prioritise the data needs and agreed that our analysis should focus on gaining deep insights rather than a broad review of excessively wide-ranging data. It included reviewing existing supplier, buying and portfolio processes alongside insights from the interviews. By going deep, we were able to clearly understand why gaps existed and how they could be closed through changes in processes, systems or behaviour.

Results

The process we followed, and the gap analysis results, helped BASF to identify and prioritise their responses, which included creating action plans and driving capability and awareness through key departments and internal stakeholders, including the Board, on an ongoing basis.