3-PART BLOG SERIES | PART 2 OF 3
By Julie Brown,
Senior Program Director, Training Center
Many HRDD efforts focus on where harm shows up: supplier sites, audits, grievances. But we know that human rights risk is rarely created at a single point—and it’s almost never resolved there.
For companies facing reputational and legal risk when issues are identified, training is often one of several important interventions. It can help demonstrate a serious response, and when done well, contribute to the real work of ceasing, preventing and mitigating harm to people.
But when “putting out fires” becomes the strategy, it misses the surrounding conditions that will allow those fires to reignite.
Training is critical precisely because it centers people as part of the solution. When done right, training can empower individuals to recognize risk, exercise judgment, and act. Knowing that, the question becomes: if people are so central to HRDD outcomes, why do we so often stop short of truly understanding the roles they occupy, the practices that structure their work, and the points of leverage available to them when designing training for them?
How risk accumulates across decisions, pressure, and power
Consider this common scenario. A global brand has invested in supplier training on its code of conduct. Audit scores improve. Corrective action plans are submitted. But six months later, excessive overtime shows up again – this time at a second-tier facility. The trigger was a last-minute order change that shortened lead times. The direct supplier passed the pressure down the chain. No one flagged the risk early, and no one escalated the constraints.
No single actor caused this. The brand’s procurement team wasn’t trying to create risk. They were responding to retail demands and deadlines. The supplier wasn’t ignoring the training they had just been through. They were managing a relationship and an order with a subcontractor they depend on. And the second-tier supplier was likely operating under conditions that don’t leave a lot of room to maneuver.
Complex situations like these expose where poorly designed trainings often fall short. Each of these actors may have received training on the code of conduct, on audit requirements, and on compliance expectations, but not in a way that reflects the decisions they actually make under pressure, or how those decisions affect others across the chain.
Training that focuses on a single role or a single standard misses how risk is created in practice. To be effective, it needs to be designed across the system: helping procurement teams recognize when commercial decisions create downstream risk, equipping suppliers to flag and respond to those pressures, and building shared expectations about when and how to escalate. Without that, the same scenario repeats regardless of how much training has been delivered.
This is not about bad actors. It is a story about how risk travels via decisions made by people with different information, different levels of authority and power, and facing distinct pressures. The consequences end up falling on people who lack the capabilities to address or prevent this accumulated risk.
When training is designed and carried out in role-by-role isolation, the information, authority, and responsibility needed to move real behavior change across the system remain unchanged.
Different roles, different constraints
Understanding that risk is distributed, and that training needs to be designed systemically, is a start. But we also need to analyze the specific constraints each role is operating under:
- Procurement is trained on human rights risk but measured on cost and speed. When a cheaper, faster option comes along, the business incentive overrides the training.
- Suppliers are trained on code of conduct standards but given pricing that doesn’t support them. They absorb the gap and pass some of it down the chain.
- Workers may have received training about their rights and how to speak up when those rights are violated, but they have come to tolerate and even depend on overtime, so the issue doesn’t get flagged.
When training is designed and carried out in role-by-role isolation, the information, authority, and responsibility needed to move real behavior change across the system remain unchanged.
The question is not whether training is needed, but what kind of training will actually change how people act in practice.
Mapping before building
Just as companies work to map their physical supply chains across multiple tiers, effective HRDD efforts must map the human systems that operate within and across those chains. This means understanding which roles are involved, how decisions flow between them, where critical information might get lost along the way, and where pressure or incentives influence behavior.
Before designing training, companies should ask:
- Which roles and individuals within the supply chain can influence the risk we are trying to address?
- Where is important information failing to reach these individuals so they can make better decisions?
- How do incentives, power dynamics, or other pressures affect the choices these people make?
These questions shift the design conversation from “what do people need to know” to “what do people need to be able to do and what barriers are in the way.” That is the foundation for something more durable than a one-off training event, and something that can lead to real behavior change.
In other words, the question is not whether training is needed, but what kind of training will actually change how people act in practice. Companies need capacity building and training that is connected to roles and decisions, and the systems those roles and decisions sit within.
In our final blog, we’ll turn to what that actually requires in practice, and how companies can build capability that holds up under real-world pressure .
About the Author
Julie leads Verité’s Training Center as an expert in instructional design, developing comprehensive educational programs for multinational companies and institutions working to identify and prevent human rights risks in global supply chains. Her work spans strategic due diligence training for executive leadership and technical skills development for auditors and suppliers operating in high-risk sectors. Through her leadership of Verité’s Training Center, Julie bridges the gap between theory and practice, translating complex human rights frameworks into actionable training.
training, capability building
