Planning and organising an environmental dialogue
1 Planning and organising an environmental dialogue
If you work for a small or medium-sized enterprise and are responsible for the environmental aspects of its activities you probably find yourself having to take care of more and more communication tasks – answering neighbours, preparing environmental accounts or procuring environmental information for your company's sales representatives and purchasing department to use in their daily work.
This manual will help you to systematise your communication work, specify objectives and prepare a simple, clear plan for your company's environmental dialogue with customers, suppliers and other stakeholders. Planning the environmental dialogue has many advantages.
You can:
 | allocate your resources to the most important stakeholders |
| choose messages that are in your company's interests |
| get the messages out at the right time |
| choose the most effective means of communication |
| use your company's time and money economically and to best effect |
| share the work between several people |
| evaluate and continuously improve the work. |
If your company wants to introduce environmental management in accordance with the EMAS Regulation or the ISO 14001 Standard you will have to prepare guidelines for the company's external environmental dialogue. The guidelines must ensure that your company decides how the dialogue with external stakeholders is to be handled, including how the company is to handle and answer external enquiries. This manual will also help you meet the EMAS and ISO requirements.
The manual provides advice on solving the problems you come across when you are planning the dialogue. Chapters 1-3 explain how to evaluate the company's situation and specify realistic objectives for the dialogue. Chapters 4-6 focus on the planning and management of the dialogue. Chapter 7 deals with evaluation. You will achieve the best results by working on the tasks in this order. The manual does not deal with the internal dialogue on a company's environmental work; another manual does that, it is called: Environmental dialogue with colleagues.
The manual is based on the assumption that you possess knowledge and experience of working with environmental issues but lack expertise in communication. Each chapter is built up around a schedule for use in carrying out the work dealt with in the chapter. To show you what the finished result looks like, an example is given of a schedule completed by an environmentally active company. The rest of each chapter consists of a few hints to help you complete the schedule yourself.