“Stakeholders are any group of people who affect or are affected by an organization’s activities, products or services and associated performance” as per the AccountAbility 1000 Stakeholder Engagement Standard.
There are multiple levels and types of stakeholders for any company with varying degrees of influence and importance to the organization. However, companies need to ensure a benchmark with regard to their engagement with these stakeholders.
Stakeholders can be internal or external and may include the company’s employees, investors, consumers, communities in which the organization operates, NGOs, governments, regulators, the media, business partners, suppliers, vendors, etc.
It refers to the process and channels that companies use to interact with relevant stakeholder groups with the intention of building relationships and trust and creating tangible and intangible value for both parties. The aim is to ensure that the company is responsive to stakeholder concerns and queries. Essentially stakeholder engagement helps achieve mutually-accepted outcomes.
Engaging with stakeholders has multiple benefits for companies and is considered a key aspect of an organization’s business strategy while also having a crucial impact on their reporting, whether annual reports, integrated reports, impact reports, or ESG and sustainability reports.
In this age of extreme competition within the business environment, companies looking to flourish and remain relevant will find that regular interactions with their relevant important stakeholders are a necessity.
Further, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the impact of the organization’s activities on the environment and society have gained importance to the point where stakeholders look to ensure that their values are aligned with the companies they are associated with. This has brought stakeholder engagement even more so to the forefront of company strategy.
In addition, the evolution of stakeholder engagement has helped ensure inclusive decision-making and accountability, with the company’s annual report acting as a vehicle to report, explain and respond to various stakeholders on the decisions made, the actions taken, and performance across financial and non-financial metrics. Annual reports provide companies with the opportune chance to provide credible disclosures on risks, opportunities, and progress made toward achieving stated targets or goals.
This is one example of the stakeholder engagement process. Different companies will have different methods of engaging with their stakeholders.
Of course, it may seem easy to acknowledge the need for stakeholder engagement but more difficult to find ways to go about it in an effective manner that produces results that help the company and the stakeholders in question. To help achieve this, companies would need to formulate and implement a stakeholder engagement policy. Below are some points to keep in mind while formulating this policy:
Creating a report that transparently displays data and information along with a convincing narrative is no easy task. This requires expertise on multiple levels, including conceptualizing the report and creating compelling content, which is enhanced by visually stunning designs to ensure easy readability.
For this reason, many companies look to specialized business report design agencies to help get their message across and one such agency is Report Yak, which has years of experience helping companies convey their stakeholder engagement results to all readers. Check out some of our work here or feel free to get in touch to discuss your next annual report.
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