How and when to involve stakeholders

Are you wondering what kind of information should be included in your non-financial report? You can get to know that by inviting your stakeholders to help you define the report’s contents.

Do your business operations involve a variety of different stakeholders? Acknowledge that in a report compliant with the GRI guidelines.

The nature of non-financial reporting requires monitoring data from many different areas of business operation. What this brings about is that the co-ordinators of the reporting process must keep in touch with many people within and outside the organization. You can leverage this property of non-financial reporting and involve those people in the process of defining the report’s contents, identifying the relevant aspects, and setting the scope of the report.

This will, in turn, make the information you publish help the readers of the report to learn more about the operations of the company and assess the impact the organization has on the business environment it exists in.

Defining a report’s content

The GRI guidelines lay out a few ground rules for defining a report’s content, one of which is that you should involve stakeholders in this process.

By stakeholders, we mean the employees and those members of the company’s business environment who influence the organization’s actions to a significant extent, as well as those entities on whom the company has a substantial impact. Stakeholders also include the entities that – for different reasons and to a different degree – are interested in the company’s operations.

In practice, stakeholders can include many different groups:

• consumers
• clients
• contractors
• the competition
• members of the local community
• shareholders and investors
• legislators, local authorities, and governmental administration
• non-governmental organizations etc.

The sheer variety of different entities, whose examples you can see above, makes stakeholder mapping a crucial part of not only the reporting process but also of the management of the company in general.

Stages of reporting

GRI, being the global standard of non-financial reporting, requires that stakeholders are identified and that the report demonstrates how the company responds to the issues relevant to those groups. At the same time, stakeholders must be included at every stage of defining the relevant aspects and their scope.

What follows is that the company being the subject of the report must always take into consideration how the information they disclose might influence the judgements and the choices made by its stakeholders.

In addition, the validation stage will ensure that the data presented in the report enable the stakeholders to accurately assess the performance of the organization.

Beyond reporting

Of course, stakeholders are not only involved in the reporting process. Because of that, GRI require that the degree of stakeholder involvement also be part of the report itself (even in a report that follows the basic guidelines). Hence, you must declare at the very beginning what groups are involved by the company and how they are selected. Subsequently, you must explain how and how often they are involved.

A special group

The so-called internal stakeholders – that is the company’s employees – constitute a vital group. If they are involved appropriately in the non-financial reporting process, the information you will receive from them will be of the highest quality and accuracy. On top of that, adequately involved internal stakeholders will make the reporting process more reliable and timely. We can never emphasise too much that it is crucial that you communicate efficiently with members of the business environment as well as with those persons whose involvement will be vital for the creation of a good non-financial report.