Advancing Worker-Centered Due Diligence: Growth and Impact in 2025
- Labor Solutions
- 1 hour ago
- 4 min read
Labor Solutions 2025: Growth, Reach, and Impact
52% More Workers Reached.
In 2025, Labor Solutions expanded its reach from 2.5 million to 3.8 million workers—a 52% increase. This worker centered impact was not about collecting more data, but about listening more effectively to workers across global supply chains.
As the only provider focused exclusively on worker and supplier engagement in global supply chains, our results demonstrate that our methodology works—at scale and across supplier maturity levels.
What's new
Building Interconnected Systems for Worker-Centered Due Diligence
In 2025, we focused on building worker-driven, scalable, interconnected solutions that turn worker and supplier input into action. We launched the WELL Worker Survey —the industry’s first modular worker survey—alongside Improve, a digital self-assessment and action-planning tool for suppliers, and aligned our full toolset, including eLearning, to WELL indicators.
The WELL Survey provides a shared foundation for high-quality, actionable data—enabling global comparability, industry learning, and real improvement. Its modular design has driven early, broad adoption and is already delivering measurable impact.
Together, WELL, Improve and eLearning create a closed-loop, worker-driven system: insights surface gaps, and Improve enables fast, targeted improvement through action planning, training, and follow-up.
The early results demonstrate clear, measurable impact.
Results
Listening to Workers Drives Change
Across agriculture, electronics, apparel, and seafood, companies are using Labor Solutions tools in three consistent ways—and seeing measurable results.
Seeing What Audits Miss: Worker Voice Reveals Risks Compliance Tools Overlook
Worker feedback gathered through the WELL Survey consistently surfaced risks audits miss. In electronics supply chains, survey results revealed illegal recruitment fees at 35% of audited suppliers and low trust in grievance mechanisms at 27%. In agriculture, worker surveys identified zero-tolerance risks such as debt bondage, enabling companies to identify and remediate high-risk sites in days—not audit cycles.
Building Supplier Ownership + Maturity: How Brands are Using Labor Solutions Tools in Practice
Long-term impact depends on supplier-owned systems that workers trust and use. Learn how brands are embedding the WOVO app and worker engagement across their entire Tier 1 suppliers and reaching hundreds of thousands of workers at once.
Focusing Measurement Where It Matters Most: How One Electronics Company Gained Real Visibility into Supplier Grievance Mechanisms
Brands are supporting suppliers through focused interventions—such as additional training on priority topics like chemical safety—and by strengthening critical systems, including operational grievance mechanisms aligned with due diligence requirements.
Tools like WELL and IMPROVE enable companies to assess the effectiveness of existing systems, identify gaps, and support supplier improvement in a targeted, practical way. By focusing measurement where risk is greatest, companies can move beyond compliance and drive measurable progress across their supply chains.
Listening at Scale
Launching the WELL Survey
In 2025 Labor Solutions launched the WELL Survey — a modular, risk-based, worker-centered survey framework designed to capture lived experience, surface hidden risks (including as part of an HRDD Process), and generate actionable insights. WELL was developed through a multi-stakeholder design process led by organizations that have deployed thousands of worker surveys reaching millions of workers worldwide for over a decade.
Since launching, the WELL Survey is used by nearly 20 brands across agriculture, seafood, electronics, footwear and apparel, and telecommunications. Companies are using it not as a standalone diagnostic, but as a core input into HRDD, supplier engagement, and improvement planning.
From Insight to Action
Aligning Tools for Faster Improvement + Worker Centered Impact
We aligned our broader toolset — including Improve and eLearning — to the WELL Survey Indicators. This alignment allows gaps identified through surveys and assessments to be addressed quickly and systematically through action planning, training, and follow-up.
WOVO Improve: Turning Worker Feedback into Real-Time Supplier Action
Listening alone is not enough. To ensure worker insights lead to measurable change, Labor Solutions also launched WOVO Improve in 2025—a self-assessment and action-planning platform designed to translate worker feedback into sustained follow-up managed by supplier teams in real time.
Improve enables suppliers to assess system maturity, prioritize corrective actions, and track progress over time — closing the loop between what workers report and what changes on the ground. Together, the WELL Survey and Improve form a continuous improvement cycle: listen → assess → act → track.
WOVO Educate: Digital Learning to Support Workers + Suppliers at Scale
As part of this effort, Labor Solutions released 24 new eLearning modules, including courses on:
Climate Change and the Workplace
Industrial Relations and Social Dialogue
Human Rights and Environmental Due Diligence (HREDD), developed with GIZ, available in 8 languages with 7 country-specific modules
Workers and managers can easily access these courses and more via the WOVO app or online learning management system.
Looking Ahead
Our Changing Landscape
As AI makes information and data cheaper and more abundant, quality matters more than ever. Direct worker voice that is experience-based, hard to fabricate, and grounded in daily reality remains the anchor of truth for effective human rights due diligence.
Real Impact
When worker voice is embedded into human resources and operations, results improve.
Visibility and communication increase. Turnover reduces and productivity increases. Risks are identified and mitigated. Suppliers are supported — and accountability becomes the engine for continuous improvement.
WOVO tools give workers a voice and an accountability system, supplier management teams the knowledge and resources to identify and address their own risks, and brands the ability to see where support is needed.
Thank you to our partners, clients, and team for making 2025 a foundational year for change.
Ready to have a conversation about the impact worker voice can have for you?
