Community engagement 101

Presentation regarding stakeholder management for community relations, investment and development practitioners.

The challenge of integrating human rights practices in business management

“The intent of integration is to make respecting human rights part of the parameters within which business is conducted – like ethical behaviour, compliance should ensure leadership from the top to embed respect for human rights, include human rights in relevant training, and develop the capacity to respond to unforeseen situations in a manner that respects human rights.”* Human rights …

Using effective indicators to measure progress on human rights management

The relevance of measuring, managing and reporting on business and human rights indicators cannot be overstated. Valid and reliable indicators could be useful to: assess the size of the human rights issues that companies face; track corporate progress over time; and compare policies, process and impacts across corporations (thus triggering healthy competition). Good human rights indicators may also operate as …

Trends in stakeholder reporting and stakeholder outcomes

Consultation tends to be a one-way flow of information where a company solicits input from stakeholder groups. Stakeholder dialogue is a more robust conversation. It gives companies an opportunity to provide context for their operational issues and also means recognising the potential for engagement to influence the behaviour of regulators, investors, consumers, competitors, and suppliers. Face-to-face meetings are most appropriate …

Common mistakes in stakeholder engagement

takeholder management can be an effective risk management tool.  But simply engaging for purposes of reporting or compliance and governance underestimates the real value of stakeholder engagement.  These days companies issuing sustainability and integrated reports do engagement half-heartedly, as is evident by the meaningless tables and lists of stakeholders and the variety of engagement methodologies displayed in these tables – …

Stakeholder engagement: A board and governance issue

Most companies communicate with stakeholders, thereby providing information about the organisation and its products, services, and operations to shareholders, customers, staff, business partners, and suppliers. The process of communicating with these groups is one type of stakeholder engagement and the strategic importance of engagement is immediately obvious. There are also many good strategic and operational reasons to engage with less …

Benefits and challenges of stakeholder engagement

Stakeholder engagement is not a new concept. Recent reporting frameworks (GRI and IIRC) have however pushed the topic up the ladder of importance for companies, as it is a specific reporting requirement in order to develop and release sustainability and integration reports. On the upside, reporting requires companies to report annually on stakeholder engagement activities, almost forcing the activity to …

A rightsholder approach to effective human rights management practices

In recent years, companies have made significant progress to understand, come to terms with and implement human rights practices. In general, this statement applies mostly to high-profile industries such as mining, oil and gas. Similarly, manufacturers as suppliers to large retail chains have also come under scrutiny in countries such as China, Indonesia and India. Initiatives such as the United …

Reporting on stakeholder engagement

Sustainability and integrated reporting guidelines and frameworks require in-depth reporting on stakeholder relationships and engagement activities.  However, it seems that companies are at a loss of how to engage, what to engage on, how to report on engagement activities and outcomes and what to do with the feedback obtained from stakeholders as a result of specific engagement activities. A stakeholder …

Understanding social capital

Presentation delivered to MBA students about the importance of social capital. What it is, how to measure it, case studies and applications. How it is different to other capitals and what is happening in the field.