This month, Unchained had the privilege of hosting Chris O’Reilly on the Unchaining Modern Slavery Webinar. Chris is the CEO of Ask Your Team in New Zealand. As part of this, he is a professional director and strategic planning consultant to a range of New Zealand businesses. His goal is to help organisations build a culture to involve their people and improve their productivity. Chris has a family history of social justice work and a passion for human rights, pushing over into the work of his business. He has firsthand experience being able to see what people can achieve when they feel a sense of belonging. From Chris’ webinar, the key takeaways were:
Base questions about human rights instead of organisational effectiveness. This has helped him be able to go to workers and find out exactly what is happening, their fears, and concerns. This gave them an entryway into modern slavery work when they used this method to find out what was happening at the heart of migrant workers and seasonal workers. This method, focusing questions on human rights and reaching out directly to the workers, has been the most successful for Ask Your Team in gaining the richest data.
Utilising technology can help inform employees that they are valued by their CEO and have a purpose in the business. The use of technology has been catching up in the world, now being able to reach people all around the world. Technology can help the government implement workplace rights and strategies, it can be used to shed light on situations of employee mistreatment and can be used for an employer to also allow their workers to have a voice and be able to ask for things they might need or be concerned about.
Ask Your Team works in modern slavery stakeholder engagement to firstly, create awareness and start the conversation about modern slavery, asking other businesses and people “what can they do?”. Ask Your Team talks about positively disrupting the workplace to give every worker a safe and meaningful way to have a voice at any time or any place. This business follows everyone with a work role. It’s a way of finding out who are and are not ethical workers but doing it with integrity and a sense of privacy for the employees who may be in dangerous environments as well.
