Stakeholder Engagement | FabianPattberg.com

Tag Archives - stakeholder engagement

Phase Three – Starting the face-to-face stakeholder engagement

October 27, 20112:30 pm

Todays post is the third in a series outlining a structured organizational stakeholder engagement approach companies and individuals can follow as well as use as a tool to improve their stakeholder engagement activities.

If you missed the first two posts please visit either of the links below:

These are the next two stakeholder engagement steps:

Step 7: Properly define and plan the in-house engagement process

During this step, your priority is to properly define and plan the process of engagement with your set of priority stakeholder groups. In the example from previous two posts we identified three key stakeholder groups for our exemplary organization. The reason for this identifying your key stakeholder groups is obvious. You need to know your target audience in this engagement phase. If you do not know your target audience at this point (or any other time of course), your engagement will fail. This is my experience.

When tackling the planning of the in-house engagement process, make sure you talk to your stakeholder champions (from within your business) and your marketing department. This is a good time to involve the marketing for very first time. I would advise against using them in an early point of the process as they usually complicate things (!). Your marketing experts will enable you to brand your engagement the way you need to from an organizational brand point of view in order to engage your stakeholder with one brand identity. From my experience this process of alleging your branding with your engagement might take a little longer. But spending this time is important in my view since this will be your first proper stakeholder engagement. And you will not get many chances to make a good first impression with the external stakeholder representatives.

Step 8: Invite the stakeholder groups to a stakeholder day

Once your plans in-house are finalized you can tackle the next big step in your stakeholder engagement. The, as I call it “stakeholder engagement day”. This day should be a formal event with representatives from your key stakeholder groups. Focus on the stakeholders which you identified as important for the start of your engagement ( step 7 and the previous post for details)

While preparing for the event try to structure the agenda in that way that you have formal sessions with interesting speakers but more importantly, leave at least 50% of the event time to specific stakeholder conversations or groups discussions so that that each stakeholder group will get their time with senior executives and their stakeholder managers.

On the event day you need to focus on facilitating conversations and gathering as much feedback as possible, written and via personal conversations. Make sure you have assigned enough people to care for your stakeholders. You do not want to have anyone standing around not engaging do you?

Picture Credit: UniqueHotelsGroup

A structured stakeholder engagement approach – The testing phase

August 18, 20112:04 pm

1 Comment

In the first post about a structured stakeholder engagement approach, I outlined the first three practical steps when starting out with stakeholder engagement. All of these steps are based on my experience working in the CSR / Sustainability field over the past 10 years.

In this post I would like continue my stakeholder engagement series and outline the next three steps. I call them the ”testing phase” of a structured stakeholder engagement approach.

Recap of the first three steps

In the previous three steps, you as the initiator, 1) identified key stakeholder groups and 2) networked in your organisation to get to know who is talking to which stakeholder and which stakeholder group is not being talked and engaged by these people. Your last step was to create an internal stakeholder champions group of these employees/colleagues you identified, in order to get everyone to the table and share information about the external stakeholder groups and individual stakeholders.

Here are the next steps based on my experience when looking to follow a structured stakeholder engagement approach. I call it the “stakeholder engagement testing phase”.

Step 4: Your priority here should be to intensify the work within the new stakeholder experts group as outlined in the first post of this series. In order to get the most out of this unique group you need to make sure that it works properly. This is the most interesting and rewarding aspect of group work in my experience. Once you assembled such a group of experts your goal should be to make the most of it.

This is a quick 2 point check-list of what to keep in mind when looking at stakeholder engagement know-how within this group:

Who is the most senior person in the group? Will there be any issue with company-wide seniority systems or any kind of leadership expectation by the most senior person in the group? Make sure you address this if you feel that there could be a problem.
Try to keep everyone as creative as possible. Do not encourage “sticking-to-the -old-way”. Use this opportunity to really create something new. This will also the best motivation for all group members.

Step 5: Choose one external stakeholder from three key stakeholder groups and reach out to them with the help of your stakeholder experts in the group. You might think that this is a very obvious and too cautious move, but be aware of the fact that you are using a new group of stakeholder experts communicating in a unfamiliar and new way.

Also keep in mind that you usually only get one impression with the individual stakeholder representatives using your new engagement approach. This is your chance for a clean start. Use it.

Once you have made a good impression, the future work with these people and the organisations will be a lot easier.

Step 6: Gather the first feedback from these engagements and analyse it in your internal stakeholder expert group. This “trial engagement” needs to show you whether the direction your group has chosen is the proving to be a better way of engaging stakeholders.

The way you chose to analyse the outcome of this engagement is really depending on the goals you have set within your group and organsation in general. Only keep this in mind: Any kind of engagement needs to involve both sides being engaged. If you feel in any way that this is not the case, within your stakeholder group or as a result of feedback from your stakeholder, you need to go back and make changes,as tough as it might seem.

A Structured Stakeholder Engagement Approach: Starting Out

July 30, 20117:34 am

4 Comments

A structured approach to stakeholder engagement is an essential element of CSR / Sustainability best practice within an organization. We all know that. But starting out is not always as easy as it seems in my experience.

Here are three practical first steps which I identified as critical over the past years working in the industry when starting out with stakeholder engagement.

Before you start anything involving stakeholder engagement, identify your key stakeholder groups first. When you know these groups you are well on your way. Here is a link to some information on how to conduct a stakeholder analysis.

Once you know your stakeholder groups, go and visit/contact employees from within your organization whom you think will know more about your individual stakeholder groups. Your aim should be to gather as much information on who is talking to which stakeholder group. This can be quite time consuming the larger your organization is, but everyone needs to start somewhere and building these personal relationships within your organization is invaluable. I am sure you will be amazed how much you will learn and benefit from this exercise. In the short and long term.

Create a group of so called “stakeholder experts” from inside your organization. Arrange to meet on a regular basis from that time on to help you gather the important stakeholder updates from within the business. I always felt that gathering this stakeholder information from inside the organization before engaging the actual stakeholder group made me understand these groups so much better.

This is all for now. I prefer shorter blog posts as you will know by now. That is why the next blog post on stakeholder engagement will continue with the next steps on how to properly start with a structured stakeholder engagement approach.

Picture Credit: Robert Higgins

Sustainability in 2010

January 4, 20105:39 pm

4 Comments

Today is my first proper work day in 2010. So why not start the year with a post about what this year might have in store for us when we look at Sustainability and some of its topical areas. Here are my thoughts on a some topics.

Sustainability in general
2010 will be a transition year when we are speaking of major developments in the Sustainability field during 2010. The big Copenhagen conference is over, the economy is still in global crisis and companies will look to strengthen their bottom line rather than their Sustainability activities. I am not trying to be overly pessimistic here but realistic. We have had our chance in Copenhagen. A chance to pave the way for a more sustainable future …… and we blew it.

Climate Change
The beginning of the year will be about making sense of the Copenhagen Accord (horrible name by the way!) Climate change activists and NGO’s will look for a new direction. And so far I cannot see an indication where they will lead us. Let’s just hope most of them choose the collaboration route rather than activism. And yes the parties from Copenhagen are planning to meet in Mexico this year for the so called Cop16. But for now the momentum has been lost and needs to pick up again. How? That is what we need to figure out now.

CSR Reporting
A lot of company reports will further transition into purely online reporting with only some printed publications next to it in my opinion. This is a good trend which will most likely continue as most companies will discover that CSR Reports are much more useful online than in print.

Stakeholder Engagement
Many companies will have to tackle this uncomfortable topic again as stakeholder pressure in all areas of Sustainability will only increase during 2010 due to the dire global economic situation. Engaging your stakeholders is crucial for all organizations, large or small, in order to have the support for the actions and decisions this company will make.
There is also danger of emerging radical stakeholder activism in my opinion. Activism which is not based on collaboration but only seeks to undermine and damage the Sustainability efforts of the particular organization. This is the last thing companies and we as their stakeholders need.
I also expect companies in the energy and consumer products sector to be the most innovative companies with regards to stakeholder engagement in Sustainability. They have to actively seek stakeholder feedback to be able to sell more. If they don’t do this they are missing out on a big opportunity.

Sustainability Leadership by CEO’s
2010 will also be a crucial year to see whether an increasing number of CEO’s will move into a leadership role with regards to Sustainability. 2009 has seen the emergence of the CEO’s of Timberland, Interface and many others speaking out about their actions and what they would like to see other organizations do with regards to Sustainability. These CEO’s have shown that doing good and communicating can lead to better reputation and increased sales. But they have also shown us that business needs to communicate in an open and honest way. This is the recipe for success and nothing else.

These are some of the thoughts which came to mind when I looked at the year ahead. What are your thoughts? Do you agree or disagree?

Picture Credit: sillygwailo

Key elements of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in an organisation

July 15, 20099:41 am

0 Comments

This is an article I wrote for the Chartered Management Institute blog this week. I wanted to share this with everyone. Please let me know what you think or whether you have any feedback on my points raised in the article.

My post on the blog:

In the last 10 years the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) movement stood for topics such as Corporate Governance, Environmental management and community engagement only to name three. CSR is being seen as the new business models for companies that want to be seen as more responsible organizations.

So why is that? Well it is not just acceptable anymore to do a little bit of environmental management here and some community involvement there. Companies are expected to construct a sounds framework of activities that all enhance their responsible business practice.

This article will outline a broad overview of the important elements for successful CSR practice within an organization.

To give this overview more structure, these elements are all subdivided into the internal and external aspects of CSR practice. This differentiation is necessary as CSR has two sides to it: 1) The internal and 2) external perspective in order to be successful.

The following main elements are important for successful CSR practice

CSR Strategy

The CSR Strategy should be the starting point of the organizational CSR practice. This strategy needs to be defined as clear as possible with a future goal in mind.

Internal Aspects:
You will need to build solid support for the strategy before you go about defining what you want to achieve with this strategy. It is key to this strategy to get the support and participation from as many high profile executives in the organization and to identify and engage these people that are passionate about CSR within the business. Once you have this support in place it will be easier for you to define the CSR Strategy for your business.

External Aspects:
The CSR Strategy will act as the positioning document for the responsible business practice of your company. Your stakeholders and the public will expect a visionary document that shows ambition and goals.

CSR Management System

After defining the strategy your next task will be to set up the CSR Management system. The management system of CSR within your business will outline what you actually need to do to make your strategy happen and to produce results.

Internal Aspects:
This is where you need to engage even more individuals in your business. Try to gather information on how the CSR Strategy has been received and then build on that to engage the most positive people. Once you have gathered a good team that supports your cause you can pool their knowledge and build a sound management plan on how to deliver the different elements of the strategy. The CSR management system is the customized tool to successful CSR. You can go around and look at the management systems of other companies but this management system really needs to be so customized to your organizational context that you nearly need to build it from scratch.

External Aspects:
This will be the CSR tool you will be asked about a lot once you have it set up. The CSR management system is your vehicle to get more external recognition of your activities. Never give away to much information but be helpful when other organizations what to have some tips. You never know how they are doing managing their CSR aspects; you might learn something for your management system.

CSR Reporting

The next step after the successful set up of the management system is the reporting of the first results of your companies CSR activities. This is called CSR reporting. Companies usually report on an annual basis. This CSR reporting is really the first test whether you and your team have created something interesting and worth reporting for your stakeholders.

Internal Aspects:
Internally this CSR reporting is really a tough task. It will test your CSR management and coordination skills. The goal is to produce a meaning full publication that will be of interest to your stakeholders. The challenge you will face inside of the company is that it will be very hard to get all the numbers and the signed of text in time to be still up to date and relevant. Remember this qualitative and quantitative data has not been gathered before so make sure everyone understands what he or she are supposed to report.

External Aspects:
CSR Reporting is a very important tool once you start out with CSR as an organization. Externally this CSR Report together with the CSR management system will be your CSR face of the organization. So the more professional you can make it the better.

Stakeholder Engagement & Communication

Stakeholder Engagement and Communication is the area, which keeps all of these areas together and connected. Without engaging your stakeholder on a continuous basis there is no real long term value in building a CSR Strategy, a report or communicating what you as an organization have been doing. So what do you need to take into account to practice successful stakeholder engagement?

Internal Aspects:
Key to Stakeholder Engagement is to be as transparent within your company about what you and your team do as the CSR team. This will be the first question colleagues will ask you: “But what do you actually do?” Effective stakeholder engagement starts in our own backyard first. Once you have that running your can turn to the external perspective of stakeholder engagement.

External Aspects:
Once you have the internal stakeholder engagement and communication running smoothly you can turn your focus to the external aspects. Here you should look to include interest groups such as NGO’s, the local community around your sites and other stakeholder groups that you have identified as being important to your organization.

External Stakeholder Engagement is very likely the hardest area of all of them outlined here. Why? Because you will take on the whole world and each and everyone can be your stakeholder depending what size of company you are working for. Research in stakeholder engagement is really still in its beginning and the future will see a lot of innovation is this external stakeholder engagement area. These innovations can be modern communication tools or effective ways to identify the particular stakeholder opinion. Exciting times ahead.

To sum up let me stress one last point which I feel is central to CSR within an organization.
Do not listen to the so-called CSR gurus and experts out there too much. Try to find your own way of making CSR happen within your business.

CSR is really only the sum of its individual approaches and best practice so why not start today to add your approach and best practice to it? It will be a journey you will never forget.