Human Rights
Our commitment
Dentsu is committed to upholding all internationally recognized human rights and the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in every aspect of our operations.
Our industry holds the power to shape perceptions, influence behavior, and impact lives. Promoting and respecting human rights as core business strategy therefore not only aligns with our vision to be at the forefront of people-centered transformations that shape society but is also essential to our long-term success.
Governance
The respect for human rights underpins our purpose, vision, and value creation towards the realization of the society we aspire to create. It has senior sponsorship, with our Global Chief Governance Officer overseeing our Group human rights program and our Heads of Human Rights responsible for overseeing day-to-day implementation.
Human Rights is a standing agenda item at the Executive-level Group Sustainability Committee which meets four times a year. Issues specific to Japan are covered by the Dentsu Group Human Rights Committee and Dentsu Human Rights Education Conference.
As an ethical and sustainable business, our commitment to upholding and respecting human rights extends beyond compliance and cuts across all aspects of our organization.
Our Heads of Human Rights work closely with our Global Functions teams – including Human Resources, Legal & Compliance, Procurement, Comms, and Brand Assurance – to embed human rights considerations, provide expertise, and build capacity for the day-to-day management of human rights risks. This includes various training initiatives including online content, and function/practice-specific workshops, to consultation from internal expertise.
In our international operations, human rights considerations are also represented at each functional working group – including the Legal & Compliance Sustainability Working Group, the Sustainable Procurement Working Group and the Policy Working Group.
Policies
“We honor internationally recognized principles of human rights. Abuses that contravene those rights will not be tolerated within our business or those of our business partners.” - Dentsu Group Code of Conduct.
Our Code of Conduct, Supplier Code of Conduct and standalone Human Rights Policy set out our commitment to honor all internationally recognized frameworks and principles of human rights, and the expectations on all employees and suppliers.
The Human Rights Policy was developed through cross-functional collaboration and external expert stakeholder consultation and is approved by the Group Management Board. It is reviewed periodically to reflect operational changes, and compliance is tracked.
It outlines our commitments to mitigate our most salient human rights impacts – as identified by our Human Rights Saliency Assessment. (See Impacts and Risks for further information) and is complemented by detailed standalone policies for specific human rights impacts including our Human Resources Policy, Supplier Code of Conduct, Global Data Protection Principles, and Physical Security Policy.
The Human Rights Policy is communicated internally, including through an online training video, and is publicly available here.
All employees, suppliers and external stakeholders are encouraged to raise any human rights concerns through our externally operated, free, anonymous, and confidential Speak Up portal.
Impacts and risks
We proactively identify and track global and market-level risks relating to human rights, including:
- real time SMS alerts for societal, environmental, and security events,
- bi-annual assessments of the risk profiles of our markets using open-sourced data, and
- our annual employee engagement survey.
We have a dedicated resilience program that supports the physical security and wellbeing of our employees when operating in or travelling to conflict and natural disaster affected geographies.
We extend our risk screening to our Global Functions suppliers, assessing their risk profiles based on location, product category and questionnaire response.
To complement our ongoing risk screening, we appointed an external expect agency to conduct a Group-wide Human Rights Saliency Assessment, identifying and assessing our salient human rights risks. This included interviews with internal and external stakeholders and incorporated affected stakeholder engagement through employee and consumer survey results. The assessment covered all aspects of our global operations, including our supply chain.
Our most salient human rights issues are:
Salient issue | Commitment |
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Equality and non-discrimination |
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Freedom of Thought, Opinion, Religion and Belief, and Freedom of Expression and Access to Information |
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Labor rights and harassment |
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Privacy and data security |
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Child Rights |
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Right to a healthy environment |
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Due Diligence
We conduct human rights due diligence throughout our operations and supply chain to identify, prevent, and mitigate risks. Our approach is aligned with the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
We encourage all employees and external stakeholders to raise any human rights concerns. We provide a variety of channels for employees to raise concerns and grievances including our Speak Up @dentsu portal, which is externally operated, free, anonymous and confidential, and available in all appropriate languages.
Our Supplier Code of Conduct requires suppliers to raise any actual or potential concerns or suspicions of wrongdoing related to their engagement or relationship with dentsu, including any breaches of the Supplier Code, using the Speak Up @dentsu portal.
We undertake thorough investigations into concerns raised, and where they are substantiated, we take appropriate remedial and corrective actions.
Employees and contingent workers receive annual training on our Code of Conduct, including information on Speak Up @dentsu.
Incidents
Since 2023, serious allegations of human rights abuses were recognized in the entertainment industry in Japan with which we engage. We are closely monitoring the status of the measures they are taking to rectify the issue, and are increasing our due diligence with this, in-line with our Code of Conduct, Supplier Code of Conduct, and Human Rights Policy.