Engaging stakeholders
(02/02/06)


Stimulators:
Ramon Arratia - Vodafone
Alan Knight - Accountability
Susan Morgan - BT

Other guests:
Adriana Mazry and Nick Robinson - BP
Marni Robinson - HSBC
Ian Roe - Barclays
Sam Wilding - Nationwide.

Our stimulators described two different types of engagement in practice, and Accountability’s approach.

Ramon told the story of Vodafone’s engagement on porn and other aspects of content controls for mobiles. The company responded to press criticism of the industry by engaging with customers, NGOs and government. The engagement helped Vodafone understand not only how important the issue is for many parents, but also that attitudes vary significantly different from country to country. That understanding helped Vodafone to respond appropriately.

BT has a high-level Leadership Panel, chaired by Jonathon Porritt. It meets four or five times a year and provides a valuable external perspective in addition to specific engagement activity. The Panel generates interesting dialogue on key questions, a perspective on emerging issues, and contributes specific thinking on "Hot Topics". It also provides a statement on BT’s performance in the CR report.

For Accountability, the concept of inclusivity (and therefore engagement) is central to corporate responsibility. The draft new standard (AA1000SES) which is open for comment during 2006, is based on the AA1000 principles of materiality, completeness and responsiveness. It describes quality engagement processes which comply with those principles, with two especially important features:

•	Stakeholders have a right to be heard and companies have a responsibility to respond
•	Engagement needs to be strategic, not just around specific issues

The discussion ranged around questions of paying stakeholders to take part in research (or at least making a donation to charity), the difficulty of capturing the varied engagement which goes on around the world and in different businesses within a multinational, and the extent to which engagement can give a voice to the voiceless.

We were taxed particularly by the question of responding. It is likely that different stakeholders will have conflicting opinions. It is also possible that a company will choose to disagree with stakeholders’ proposals or to turn down the recommendations of a Panel. Clearly the responsibility for taking those decisions rests with management – engagement is only advisory. But there is clearly a risk that the engagement process will lose value for stakeholders if it appears to be merely cosmetic.

The view round our table was that transparency is critical (in fact one guest suggested it is more important than the outcome). A company needs to explain not only how it is engaged, but also report the outcomes and explain why stakeholder views have not prevailed, if that is the case.