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Planning and organising an environmental dialogue

2 With whom does the company wish to have an environmental dialogue?

When planning your company's environmental dialogue, you should start by prioritising the stakeholders with whom the company needs to have a dialogue. Remember that the company's stakeholders are not only the groups you want to reach. They include all groups that have an interest in the company's environmental performance and therefore expect to be informed and heard.

If the environmental dialogue is to produce results, you must in the nature of things use most resources on the stakeholders that are important to the company. Without prioritisation you risk spending too much of your time on servicing groups that are not strategically important, e.g. students, consultants or environmental managers or similar from other companies.

With a precise and balanced prioritisation, you can ensure that most of the dialogue is with stakeholders that are of value to the company and that you do not forget to allocate time and resources to others that are interested in the environmental impacts of the company and its products.

A dialogue map like the one shown on this page will help you prioritise your work with the various groups. The company in the example has previously communicated mainly with students, environmental organisations, etc., but now intends to concentrate on customers, suppliers and neighbours.

(figure caption and text)

Dialogkort = Dialogue map
Hidtidig indsats = Previous action
Fremtidig indsats = Future action

(middle - clockwise)
Leverandører = Suppliers
Naboer = Neighbours
Miljøorganisationer = Environmental organisations
Miljøfolk fra andre virksomheder = Environmental staff from other companies
Studerende = Students
Ekisterende kunder = Existing customers
Nye kunder = New customers

(right-hand side)

0 = no resources
1 = few
2 = average
3 = some
4 = many

The dialogue map is your basis for a discussion with the management about the types of stakeholders on which the company has previously concentrated and the types on which it is going to concentrate in future.

Hints 2.1 and 2.2 explain how to identify the stakeholders and mark them as axes on the map. Hint 2.3 explains how to specify the action to be taken with each stakeholder.

2.1 Identify the most important stakeholders

You can use your business goals to help identify the stakeholders most needed by the company for an environmental dialogue. These stakeholders must then be included in the dialogue map. Enter each of the principal stakeholders as one of the axes on the map.

You identify the principal stakeholders by assessing the role played by the environment in fulfilling your company's objectives for cooperation with the stakeholder in question.

If the objectives have been written down, you will probably find them in:

	accounts and budgets
	sales and marketing plans
	instructions to sales representatives and the purchasing department
	environmental policy and environmental action plans.

Although the management works on the basis of specific objectives, these may not have been written down. Try to get the people in charge of the various areas to describe the objectives.

Begin with the sales manager or similar. The company's plans for marketing and sales are factors determining many of the environmental questions that need to be discussed with other stakeholders – for example, suppliers, authorities and lenders.

The company's principal stakeholders listen to others and are easily influenced. The groups that influence them do not necessarily play a major role in the day-to-day operation of the company, but the company has to have an ongoing dialogue with them because they influence other, more important stakeholders. You must therefore take account of these groups in your prioritisation and include them in the dialogue map.

For example, customers pay more attention to your environmental aspects when an environmental organisation has raised a debate in the media about environmental problems in your industry, and complaints from neighbours about your emissions can result in a reaction from the regulatory authorities.

2.2 Take the other stakeholders into account

Besides identifying the company's principal stakeholders and those that influence them you should find out whether there are others that take an interest in the company's environmental aspects. That will enable you to prevent problems that might arise if someone thinks that they have not received enough information about the company's environmental aspects. By means of the axes on the map you can enter other stakeholders that have contacted the company or shown interest in other ways.

Check what enquiries the company has received concerning environmental matters and find out what they were about. With an environmental management system based on ISO 14001 or EMAS, the company must have guidelines that ensure that external enquiries are dealt with and answered.

If your company does not have guidelines for handling external enquiries, you can instead make a note of the enquiries you are asked to deal with. Enquiries of that kind can also land on the management's desk, so ask your managing director what enquiries the company has received concerning environmental matters.

Besides those making direct enquiries, others may be interested in the industry's environmental aspects and perhaps also in your company. You can find out who is interested in environmental problems in your industry through the company's trade organisations and the public debate in the media. The debate takes place in three types of media. You can follow it in:

	National and international trade journals
	nationwide media
	local media.

If your company's management is willing to spend money on it, it is a good idea to use a media agency to supply you with all press mention of environmental aspects in your industry.

2.3 Specify the efforts for each stakeholder

When you have entered the stakeholders in the form of axes on the dialogue map, you can prioritise the ones with which you wish to have an environmental dialogue.

On the axes' scale from zero to four, mark the resources the company has used on the stakeholders in question up to the present time. By connecting the points, you will get a picture of the company's previous action. Then enter in the same way your proposals for future prioritisation of the company's resources in the dialogue with the various stakeholders. As you will see from the example on page 9, the centre of the map is zero, and the level of action rises as the lines radiate out.

You can supplement the dialogue map with a description of the stakeholders. This will make it easier for the management to understand your prioritisation, and with detailed knowledge, it is easier to specify realistic objectives for the dialogue and choose the means that best suit the stakeholders' interests, needs and knowledge.

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