Stakeholder Engagement

Properly involving stakeholders in formulating corporate responsibility programmes results in more focus and success

Stakeholder involvement in corporate responsibility activities is surrounded by rhetoric. Still, most companies continue to develop, implement, and manage their CR as an essentially top-down process.

Our research, described in more detail in Leveraging Corporate Responsibility: The Stakeholder Route to Maximizing Business and Social Value, shows quite convincingly that neither employees nor consumers are content to be passive recipients or even “enablers” of a CR programme. They want to be “enactors” and actively engage in co-creating CR initiatives with employees of the company. Co-creation allows stakeholders to become part of the solution and reduces the gap between their expectations and the firm’s response.

While co-creation is not a new idea, it is becoming increasingly important as more companies take a multistakeholder approach to their CR activities. But, not enough has been done to engage companies’ primary stakeholders, such as employees and customers, as CR is still essentially a...