I am sure you are going to love this one…if you have a little bit of patience: it is well worth it!
Stakeholder relationship management (or more appropriately srg where the g stands for governance) is likely to be the best possibile outcome for our profession in the near future, and here is a very promising and brand new tool implemented a few hours ago by ENEL, Italy’s largest utility company and a major player on the European energy market.
But before I link you to the tool which as you will gather has required quite a lot of thinking and testing , a few words of introduction which I hope will allow you to better evaluate and assess it in all its tremendous potential:
1) principal author of this is my very good friend Roberto Zangrandi (by the way, perfect english, german and french so you may, if particularly interested contact him directly at roberto.zangrandi@enel.it, and he enjoys sharing and conversing). He is for the moment (he will be going to Bruxelles in September to head his company’s liason office with the European institutions) head of CSR in Enel and has been instrumental in the last four years in implementing a csr program which has, to say the least, earned his company the sixth position in Fortune’s list of global socially responsible corporations;
2) the whole stakeholder concept has been mostly the work of economists who normally do not have a clue of operational issues and do not understand what communication and relationships are all about, therefore their rationalization has been of very little help to us in terms of ‘ok, stakeholder relationships are important, but how do I do it?’.
We have sofar been able to segment them somewhat (shareholders, suppliers etc…) and, by learning to create and facilitate virtual communities, we have been able to at least theorize the possibility of one-with-one relationships which trascend interpersonal relations (the most effective, but prohibitive for all the reasons you know better than I do);
3) one of Roberto’s best characteristics is an unrestrained curiosity (of course assisted by the support he has been able to receive from his company…. but this is also a merit in itself) and this is the result he has been able to achieve sofar: getting stakeholders to profile themselves along values ENEL believes are essential so that whoever will shortly be in charge of srg for the Company she/he will be able to develop, promote, use and adapt the system in order to engage individual stakeholders, according not only to their traditional profile (employees, suppliers etc) also according to their value separation from Enel’s…all this obviously (but maybe not so obviously) in total transparency. Needless to say that Enel, in turn, will be able to assess whether it has selected the values which correspond to those of its stakeholders and where the gaps are in order to either modify them or, if no modifiable, induce stakeholders to change theirs….
Ok, enough: please click here and visit sustainability meter.
Take a good look, think about the potential and please let me know what you think….
ps.
while you are at it if you are interested in corporate sustainability reports also take a good look at the recently posted 2006 report which, for the first time, at least in my country, applies the most recent GRI-G3 process.
Thank you Catherine and Livia:
Of course the tool can be shared – and a discussion on SRG started.
I have taken a ride on the sustainability meter. It’s an exciting, graphicly welcoming, easy and fast to use tool, that has certainly needed a lot of work and resources to set up. Perhaps Enel could think of sharing its experience with those non profit organizations that are actively working at stakeholder relationship governance?
Great tool – thanks for highlighting and sharing the news. And congratulations to ENEL for a good step forward.