A company’s carbon footprint, environmental responsibility, and respect for human rights in the workplace are no longer secondary concerns, but rather key drivers of performance and decisive criteria in an increasingly competitive and regulated business world. This is evidenced by a recent milestone achieved by EcoVadis, whose certifications have become a search criterion on Amazon Business. In this context, Fast Company’s recognition of EcoVadis as one of the world’s most innovative companies illustrates the growing role of these solutions in transforming practices across global supply chains.
Fast Company is a leading American media outlet dedicated to innovation, business, and technology. Each year, it publishes a ranking of the world’s most innovative companies, which has become a recognized barometer in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. This year, EcoVadis was selected in the “social impact” category for its work in rethinking how companies collect, deploy at scale, and leverage data related to labor and human rights within supply chains, particularly through its Worker Voice solution. Companies today face growing pressure to identify and address human rights risks throughout their value chain. Yet many still lack direct visibility into actual working conditions.
Traditional approaches, such as social audits, often provide only a snapshot and a partial view, leaving blind spots. This need for reliable information at the worker level is all the more critical given that an estimated 28 million people are living in conditions of forced labor.
EcoVadis’ Worker Voice solution addresses this lack of visibility by providing workers with a simple and anonymous way to speak up at any time. It fosters an open and ongoing dialogue between workers, suppliers, and companies, helping organizations detect and address human rights risks earlier, meet due diligence requirements, protect their reputation, and build stronger, more trustworthy supply chains. Worker Voice is already used by hundreds of EcoVadis clients, enabling them to go beyond compliance and tangibly improve working conditions for approximately 176 million people worldwide.
“Our vision has always been to embed sustainability at the heart of companies’ day-to-day decisions,” said Pierre-François Thaler, co-founder and co-CEO of EcoVadis. “But you can’t manage what you can’t see. For too long, companies have lacked visibility into what is actually happening within their supply chains, with real-world consequences for the people whose work keeps the global economy running. This recognition underscores the importance of understanding what is actually happening on the ground and using that information to accelerate social progress.”
