Category Archives: Stakeholder engagement

Trusty tools of the trade: #5 stakeholder analysis

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Allow me to be straight up on this one: listing your organisation’s key stakeholders is not stakeholder analysis. And it is not stakeholder engagement.

It is stakeholder identification.

And it’s a good start.

Stakeholder analysis is the process of identifying, categorising and then prioritising stakeholders in order to determine the impact and influence that individuals or groups will have on your ability to achieve your objectives. In the process, you will also identify and determine material issues.

After this is done, you can work out the most effective engagement approach for identified priority stakeholders, including tactics and tools, taking into consideration timing and the resources you have available. That’s stakeholder analysis in a nutshell.

And then you do what you said you’d do in those plans. And listen to feedback. And refine. And so on. That’s the engagement part.

Many practitioners and organisations skip stakeholder analysis – the thinking part – and jump straight into stakeholder engagement – the doing part.

The problem is, all the doing part without the thinking part can be a waste of time, money and resources because you are likely to a) stray from the business strategy and overall objectives b) go it alone and not engage your influential peers and colleagues who will be a determinant of success and c) miss the mark on measuring impact and success.

So, my advice is to think about your stakeholders before you engage with them.

It will make all the difference.

 

 

Trusty tools of the trade #3: inputs, outputs, outcomes

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Stay with me, I’m on a roll with my trusty tools of the trade series. Number one was the key message and number two was storytelling.

Onwards to number three - inputs, outputs and outcomes.

I know – measurement. Cue rolling eyes. I used to (still do sometimes). My career started out in journalism – a world away from any discussion about inputs, outcomes and outcomes. Yet as I progressed into consulting roles and then management, the realisation that what I was doing (inputs), created an immediate result (output) that would then result in some type of change over time (outcome) was a revelation to me.

Aha, it’s true. You can’t manage what you can’t measure.

Measurement is good management. It’s also self-preseveration; you’re a sitting duck if you can’t explain how you’re tracking against your KPIs and how your effort helps the organisation deliver on its overall business strategy and objectives.

The inputs, outputs and outcome model helps to:

  • Select the right measures: what does success look like? What are the quantitative or qualitative indicators that will be used over time to measure that success?
  • Allocate resources: who is going to undertake the activities in order to achieve that result and how much will it cost? If those resources are taken away or increased, what impact will it have on the outcome?
  • Influence peers: what are the key messages about strategy, resource allocation and performance that need to be communicated to decision-makers?
  • Monitor and evaluate: are you on the right track, if not, what can you change? Were you successful overall, if not, why not?

Speaking of evaluation, this is the third post in a series where I’m attempting to document the tools, approaches and methodologies that I’ve learnt and adopted into my professional practice over the years.

Let me know if they’ve been of any use to you.

 

 

 

Material that won’t lose the plot: part II

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I’ve been blogging for a couple of years and according to my analytics, the most popular post I’ve written so far is on the topic of materiality.

It’s still a hot topic in the sustainability reporting field. As it should be. Materiality is central to the strategy and story that a sustainability report seeks to communicate to an organisation’s stakeholders.

I came across this GRI blog post answering a question about how materiality will be examined as part of the GRI’s development of the next generation of its reporting guidelines, the ‘G4‘.

Two points stood out from the GRI’s answer:

1. The Materiality Principle is not under question in the G4.

2. One of the main focus areas of the G4 is to ‘improve considerably guidance around the definition of what is material (from different perspectives)’.

Point #2 is important. Reporters need as much help and guidance as they can get on establishing a robust materiality assessment process that is effective yet practical and logical. I’m looking forward to seeing how this materialises (excuse the pun) in the G4.

I’ve registered to take part in the G4 public comment period; what about you?

 

 

 

Three big questions for every CSR Manager (and a few hints on the answers)

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So we’re off and running in 2012. Places to go, people to see. Work to do. Lots. So what should take priority for those with Corporate Responsibility reporting responsibilities? These three questions may help:

  1. What are you doing to champion the value of integrated reporting within your organisation? It’s the latest push in the CSR/Sustainability field and for good reason. The case for greater integration between financial and non-financial performance is clear. Yet it’s always the how you go about adapting new concepts to your organisation’s strategy and culture that makes or breaks the change process. The IIRC’s discussion paper Towards Integrated Reporting includes some practical information on alternative pathways to integrated reporting (p20).
  2. Is your materiality assessment process robust enough? Regardless of your approach to reporting (stand alone versus combined versus integrated), this is the cornerstone of any good report and it’s only as good as the inputs and the analysis and engagement process that supports it. Now is a good time to ask the hard questions: is your materiality assessment done frequently enough? Have you engaged the right people internally at the right time in the process? Have you linked your process to other strategic planning efforts within the organisation? Have you done our best to seek input from key external stakeholders? Can you prove it? Do you need to address gaps with further research?  AccountAbility’s five-part materiality test is a good reference point for what information to consider and disclose as part of this process.
  3. Are you communicating the right information to the right stakeholders in the right format and in the right forums? While the push towards integrated reporting is gaining pace, so too is the need to package up information for stakeholders that is relevant and accessible. So while the final reporting product is evolving into a more strategic, succinct and compelling performance narrative, there are additional demands to segment that story for key stakeholders. Communication planning is a core part of the CR reporting process and understanding stakeholder communication and engagement preferences should be a priority right from the start. What’s the point of all that work if no-one inside or outside your organisation uses the information?

If you’re still struggling with the answers to these questions and need a hand, let me know.

It’s what I do.

The five post(s) with the most: yours and mine

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Dear readers

Thank you for your support during 2011. I really appreciate you sticking with me as I launched myself into the social media universe with this blog and my twitter account @thebriefingnote (by-the-by, most of you are fellow Aussies, half of you found me via Google, another 20 per cent found me via twitter or Linkedin referrals and the rest of you seem to know my URL. Perhaps these are my family members).

Engaging in social media has been and remains a very steep learning curve. I think that’s one of the main reasons why it’s become such a key area of interest for me.

In fact, I’ve evolved into a bit of an advocate for social media technologies as a learning and development, engagement and leadership channel for professionals.

I consult across a number of areas so my blog posts are varied in subject. According to my Google Analytics, the five posts you liked the most this year were:

  1. Who Needs the King’s Speech When We Have Anna’s, which was about the speech Queensland Premier Anna Bligh delivered following the tragedy of the State’s extensive flooding;
  2. Raising the Bar on Stakeholder Engagement, which was about AccountAbility’s Stakeholder Engagement Standard;
  3. A Dozen Ways to Build a Better Corporate Culture (self-explanatory really);
  4. Four Reasons Why Journalists Should Pay More Attention to Corporate Responsibility Reports; and (drum roll)
  5. Material That Won’t Lose the Plot, which is about the importance of materiality in corporate responsibility strategy and reporting.

A highlight of the past year has been discovering the work of other bloggers. I’ve learnt so much from you all. The top five posts that I felt pressed my ‘Eureka’/great insight button over the past year are:

  1. From a leadership, governance and social media perspective, Lucy P. Marcus’ post What it Means to be Connected Today (via HBR blog);
  2. From a corporate responsibility reporting viewpoint, Elaine Cohen’s post Heretical Thoughts on Integrated Reporting;
  3. From a blogging as a valuable personal and professional learning experience, Peter Bruce’s post Reflections on Blogging; 
  4. From a social media, leadership and career path perspective, Rosabeth Kanter’s piece (read in 2011, but written in 2009), On Twitter and in the Workplace, it’s power to the Connectors;
  5. And for the ultimate reality check (and a quiet tear), Sally Sara’s piece on leaving Kabul, Afghanistan as the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent.

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas!

Alexis

Communicating change: the never-ending story

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Whether you’re launching a new sustainability initiative, announcing (another) major change with big ramifications for your employees or batting up a new idea to your senior leadership team – communicating change to the people who have a stake in it is the never-ending story of our time.

The story has to begin with the characters that make that story engaging. Your stakeholders.

As I’ve blogged about in previous posts, stakeholder is not a catch-all, generic throwaway label. It should be segmented into specific groups or individuals that mean something to your business. Those stakeholders should be assigned to a strategy and engagement plan. An accountable relationship manager. And you should understand their issues and communication preferences and what this in turn means for the way you engage with them.

Which brings me to the communication strategies that support change, the never-ending story so-to-speak.

The success of a communication strategy won’t depend entirely on the savviness of your communication tools or the sophistication of your branding or imagery. It certainly helps.

Whether or not you use traditional or new communication channels won’t be the final arbiter of success either. It’s likely to be a combination of the two.

It will depend on your ability to understand your stakeholders and engage with them in a manner and with a message that encourages them to listen, participate and engage. And then anticipating how these needs are changing and adjusting your strategy and so on.

Never-ending.

How to put stakeholder engagement on the board agenda, and keep it there

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Does your board of directors join the dots between quality stakeholder engagement, good governance, resilient reputation and robust corporate performance?

Or are you struggling to advocate the value of stakeholder engagement at the board level?

Tabling or presenting a board paper on the value of stakeholder engagement is one thing; demonstrating how you measure it — and track progress and performance over time –is another thing altogether.

This quote from the President of Oxfam America, Ray Offenheiser, quoted in The Ceres Roadmap for Sustainability (p25), sums it up for me:

“To operate successfully in a complex global business environment, forward-looking companies need to open their doors to diverse stakeholders and incorporate these perspectives into strategic decisions and sustainable development initiatives”.

So how do you get started or change course in order to educate the board on the value of stakeholder engagement and its relationship to overall strategy and organisational performance? Here are five suggestions:

  1. Suggest the relevant board committee’s charter is expanded to include stakeholder engagement. For example, this may be the Corporate Responsibility or Sustainability committee. An foundation piece of work may be a policy or strategy outlining how senior leadership intends to engage with your most influential stakeholders and why.
  2. Establish or review appropriate consultative or advisory bodies to assist management and the board broaden their perspective on material issues. I say ‘appropriate’ because every organisation is different and what’s fit-for-purpose varies by industry and organisation size and structure.
  3. Present the results of stakeholder and reputation research. This used to be considered bold stuff, but in the age of transparency, 24/7 media and social media, it should be the norm on an annual or bi-ennial basis.
  4. Present the outcome of an annual or bi-ennial materiality assessment process. This is already a key component of the GRI sustainability reporting framework and should be aligned with other strategic planning initiatives such as corporate plans; it should also be linked to the research mentioned in point #3.
  5. Invite a key stakeholder (or two) in. Hearing a key stakeholder’s opinion on the risks and opportunities facing the organisation in a confidential environment can be powerful – for both parties. It can also send a clear message about the culture of the board and the organisation overall which is ‘we’re keen to listen and learn’.

A demonstrated willingness to listen to, and learn from stakeholders will allow organisations to move from a defensive/risk business case approach for stakeholder engagement to one of opportunity and innovation.

Are you a board director? Do you think these five suggestions have merit or would you suggest other avenues for influence?

10 things I like about mecu’s winning report

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The 2011 Australasian Annual Reporting Awards were announced recently and their special awards category for Sustainability Reporting was won by Australian credit union mecu (142,877 members, $2.43b in assets, $26.8m net profit before tax, 371 staff and 33 service centres across Australia). This is the second time mecu has won this award.

Here are 10 things I like about mecu’s 2009/10 Sustainability Report structure and approach:

  1. This is their sixth Sustainability Report. Chairman Peter Crocker’s introductory statement references mecu’s commitment to responsible banking and I think it’s important to hear this message from a credit union via their corporate reporting given the dominance of the big four banks in Australia.
  2. Their Sustainability Covenant. A series of commitments have been made between mecu and the Victorian State Government agency EPA Victoria in a voluntary covenant arrangement, which is reviewed regularly and renewed every three years. To my mind, this partnership and agreed goals and commitments (and public accessibility of the document) further ups the ante on transparency and accountability. This can only be a good thing for management in both organisations as they strive to achieve stated goals.
  3. Things you can do. The Covenant includes a goal to assist members to live more sustainable lifestyles and there is a neat theme through the report which reinforces practical tips in a ‘be the change you want to see in the world’ kind of way across the categories of communal, food, garden, goods, house, recreation, services, transport, waste and work.
  4. Sustainability governance. mecu’s Board structure includes a Sustainable Development Committee which meets quarterly. This is best practice and in line with one of the 20 key expectations for the 21st Century Corporation as outlined in Ceres’ excellent Roadmap for Sustainability which states “a committee of the board will assume specific responsibility for sustainability oversight within its charter”. Governance also includes a staff Sustainability Reference Group called ‘Footprints’ which indicates a commitment to integration of sustainability principles throughout the organisation.
  5. Global commitments. mecu is a signatory to the UN Environment Program Statement by Financial Institutions on the Environment (UNEP FI), the UN Global Compact and the UN Principles for Responsible Investment (UN PRI). It appears mecu aims to leverage these leadership initiatives for responsible investment accreditation for some of its products, which would be a good move in order to promote innovation and product differentiation.
  6. Their honesty. In the ‘reporting structure’ section which describes how mecu sought feedback on its 2008/09 report, the company conceded a low response rate to the reporting section of its online Sustainability Strategy and Reporting Survey with “the majority of questions only answered by three respondents”. Ouch. That must have been difficult to disclose. However, what I would hope for as a reader is that mecu seeks to find other ways to engage their stakeholders to obtain a more robust level of feedback in the future.
  7. Only five of mecu’s 142,877 members reportedly lost their cards in 2009/10 – impressive! The Card Fraud table under ‘Ethics and Governance’ discloses the total cost of reported fraud at $307,659 which impacted on 312 of its members. The significant line item in the table is ‘fraudulent use of card number’, affecting 238 members at a total cost of $156,576, which explains why mecu invests in fraud awareness training with its staff and participates in public awareness campaigns to reduce their members vulnerability to fraud.
  8. Hyperlinked materiality table. The materiality assessment is segmented by environment, community, workplace and marketplace and is hyperlinked to the relevant section of the report which makes it easy to cross-reference and investigate further. There doesn’t appear to be any external stakeholder involvement in determining material issues, which is something I advocate to clients to ensure internal assessments of what’s important to the future of the business is compared and contrasted with expectations of key stakeholders.
  9. Its brevity. The report is succinct, easy to read and written in a plain English style. Report navigation is good, aided by the break out headings on the right hand side of the page. A separate summary report is available as well.
  10. If it wasn’t for their Sustainability report, I wouldn’t know as much about mecu as I do after reading it. mecu’s Victorian heritage is strongly reflected in its membership base with only  5% of its members residing in my home state of New South Wales. We Aussies tend to be a parochial lot. Sustainability reports can fulfil an important reputation and branding role in the marketplace, which has certainly been the case for me in the case of this organisation.

I referred to the hyperlinked material issue table in point #8. It was a shame the GRI G3 Content Index didn’t follow this format as it’s very handy when you’re benchmarking company performance.  Next year perhaps.

Who doesn’t love to bask in the warm glow of peer and industry recognition for a job well done? Have you won a report for your sustainability report lately or read any award winning reports you think warrant a look?

Will phone hacking be the media sector’s watershed corporate responsibility moment?

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The profession of journalism has News International and News of the World to thank for launching a period of intense global scrutiny of the media sector – who regulates, owns, manages and creates content and to what ethical standards.

So will this crisis of credibility in journalism be the media sector’s watershed moment in relation to corporate responsibility? Pretty much every other sector of the economy seems to have had theirs or moved onto the next one.

It may be too late for the media sector to avoid the regulatory stick. However I would argue that those companies that have already made serious attempts to demonstrate and communicate a commitment to corporate responsibility – accountability and transparency above and beyond compliance – will be in a far better position to be heard within a hostile stakeholder environment.

Perhaps the inevitable inquiries and reviews may have a positive outcome – we may start to see more corporate responsibility or sustainability reporting from the sector.

As luck would have it, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)’s latest sector supplement is designed specifically for the Media Sector and is open for comment until 4 August 2011 (note for Australian readers, the ABC is represented on the global working group). This presents an obvious starting point for those media organisations that want to learn more about how to start or further develop their reporting approach and in the process, share information and practices with stakeholders that builds (or restores) trust.

Yet reporting alone will not guarantee any improvement in reputation, corporate culture or ethical standards. In fact, corporate responsibility reporting that follows hot on the heels of crises inevitably raises eyebrows. Authenticity and motivations are questioned. Rightly so. Stakeholders expect to see evidence of real change and improvement in performance and not a tokenistic effort that tells them what they want to hear.

The Guardian in the UK and it’s “Living our Values” sustainability report is an excellent model to examine. Not only does it report extensively on its sustainability performance, it has its performance externally assured and publishes this statement on its website. Read the introduction to its 2011 Sustainability Report and you’ll get a seat in the front row feel for the complexities of managing a media business these days. Or if you don’t have time, they’ve even written a condensed 15-minute version. Nice. The important point to note is that the Guardian has been doing this for a while and it shows, not only in their performance but in their governance.

In Australia, it appears our media sector has still got its trainer wheels on in respect to consolidated external reporting on its corporate responsibility or sustainability efforts and governance of these issues at the Board level.

Australian media organisations should be encouraged to adopt corporate responsibility reporting as a means of demonstrating accountability and transparency to their audiences, employees and external stakeholders.

The only way is up.

Stakeholder knowledge management: how to avoid Groundhog Day

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Do you know who maintains the most important stakeholder contact information and engagement history in your organisation? (And I’m not talking about the boss’s Christmas card list or the attendee list from a recent product launch).

Does it feel like Groundhog Day every time you request such a database or contact management system and someone dusts off an excel spreadsheet that hasn’t been updated for more than a year? It normally adds at least a month to your project timeline while stakeholder contacts are researched and updated.

There are many strategic projects where success hinges on an organisation’s ability to reach stakeholders and motivate a response from them. Yet many organisations don’t seem to value knowledge management in respect to stakeholder engagement, hence a lot of groundhog days and reinventing the wheel, often under pressure in order to meet tight deadlines.

Maintaining up-to-date contact information for stakeholders – including communication preferences (phone, email, post, and now blogs and social media accounts) and engagement history - at leadership and operational levels – is an ongoing job that often falls between the cracks of administration, account management, issues management and strategic planning. No-one seems to want the job – it’s too much administration for senior people, yet too complex for administration staff to manage alone.

Here are three tips on how to avoid stakeholder knowledge management groundhog day.

  1. Own it. Someone needs to be accountable for co-ordinating the stakeholder contact information and engagement history, communicating with the people who are accountable for key stakeholder relationships and choosing the IT system that best suits your needs to house the information (eg customised solution, off the shelf).
  2. Report it. Providing regular updates on your stakeholder engagement activity is a practical way to value stakeholder insights, keep stakeholder engagement top of mind and share updates on movements between roles, contacts and industry developments.
  3. Update it. The value of any contact management system lies in its accuracy. Practice makes perfect – so the more you update it, the more valuable it will be.

What does success look like? The next time you want to conduct reputation research, seek feedback on a corporate responsibility report, seek input on a mutually important issue or extend an invitation to participate in a multi-stakeholder project – you can avoid Groundhog Day and move swiftly from the planning to implementation phase.

What’s been your experience? Any contact management software or solutions you’ve had a good experience with – and importantly, why?