Strategic stakeholder engagement

"Welcome to the Reputation Economy--a world in which perceptions are reality, in which reputation dynamics drive value creation and value destruction. To succeed in this environment, organizations must learn to navigate the complex web of relationships they inhabit and recognize the growing importance that stakeholder perceptions have on a company's prospects for long-term growth." - Reputation Institute

The best way of learning the true potential of your sustainability effort, is to systematically identify and engage your stakeholders on the issue.

Let's look at a case to illustrate this fact.

A large actor in the consumer retail sector decided to start implementing the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standard in their sustainability reporting. The GRI framework soon made the Corporate Responsibility (CR) manager aware of weaknesses within their stakeholder engagement.

The company, which had been implementing and reporting sustainability efforts for a couple of years, had not previously applied a structured approach to their stakeholder engagement process. They lacked necessary structure, coordination and documentation of their different stakeholder dialogues. This left company unable to utilize the results of their stakeholder engagement as an effective input for strategy formulation and business innovation.

As the deadline for the sustainability report was rapidly approaching, the CR manager realized the company needed outside help. Together with the senior management, we assisted them in mapping out stakeholders according to importance for company success. After engaging identified key stakeholders on behalf of the company, we delivered:

We also made sure the loop was closed with the involved stakeholders, by helping the company feed back its response, in a way that increased trust and commitment in their relation to the company.

The result of the strategic stakeholder engagement was that the company was able to reallocate significant resources away from previously planned initiatives, to ones that stakeholders indicated that they wanted the company to prioritize. The company was also able to report their stakeholder engagement according to the GRI standard and is now complying with the C+ level of the GRI framework.