Planning and organising an environmental dialogue
3 What topics should be included in the dialogue?
| 3.1 | Gain an idea of the stakeholders' wishes |
| 3.2 | Use the daily contact |
| 3.3 | Describe your proposals |
Once you and the management have decided which stakeholders the company is going to
concentrate on, you must identify their wishes and decide on your proposals to them. With
this knowledge you can specify objectives and choose the best way of achieving them. You
cannot specify realistic objectives if you do not know whether both parties wish to
discuss the same subjects or how much distance there is between the stakeholders' wishes
and your possibility of fulfilling them.
Prepare a schedule with three columns, one for the stakeholders' wishes, one for the company's possibilities and one for proposals. In the example shown, the company has included customers, suppliers and neighbours. Start by inserting the stakeholders' wishes. Hints 3.1 and 3.2 tell you how to identify their wishes. Then note down the possibilities and proposals you want to present to the stakeholders. Hint 3.3 tells you how to determine the company's possibilities.
Stakeholders |
Stakeholder's wishes |
Our possibilities |
Our proposals to the stakeholder |
Existing customers |
The customer wants products with the Swan eco-label. |
We can change the products to meet the criteria for the Swan eco-label. That will take one year and cost around DKK 1 million. |
(We cannot inform the customer before the next board meeting, when it will be decided whether we are going to invest in eco-labelling.) |
Selected customers |
|
We have built a system that enables us to take back packaging from our products from customers. There is a charge for this. |
We propose a trial period in which they test the advantages and disadvantages of the return scheme. |
Suppliers of key products |
The supplier proposes cooperation on less environmentally harmful products. |
Our attitude to the supplier's proposal depends on our customers' needs. |
We ask the supplier to wait until we have had meetings with our customers. |
All suppliers that meet our environmental requirements |
|
We can tell them how our environmental management system works. |
We invite the suppliers to discuss how they can comply with our environmental policy. |
Neighbours |
Neighbours will not accept noise at night from delivery of goods to our premises. |
We can reorganise our transport system in such a way that we only receive goods during the day. This will take about six months. |
We ask our neighbours to be patient with us for the six months it will take to reorganise our transport system. |
3.1 Gain an idea of the
stakeholders' wishes
If you do not know exactly what the stakeholders want, you risk spending time and money on communication activities that do not meet their expectations and that are therefore doomed to failure. Once you know their wishes you must determine how far there is between you and whether there is a realistic chance of arriving at a common understanding.
You can map the stakeholders' wishes within four areas. In each area, you can note what they want from your company environmentally:
 | Products. The products' environmental impact throughout their life cycle (from raw materials to disposal) and how far the company can influence the products' environmental characteristics |
| Activities: The company's environmental impact through use of resources, emissions and similar and its ability to control the impact |
| Environmental policy: The company's environmental policy and action areas |
| Dialogue: The ways in which the stakeholders wish to receive environmental information and discuss environmental issues with the company. |
3.2 Use the daily contact
The daily contact between the company and its stakeholders is the best way of gaining an idea of the stakeholders' wishes. If you provide your sales representatives, purchasing department and others with a checklist, they can find out during their daily work the environmental wishes of their business partners.
Your customers' interest in the company's environmental aspects is an important factor when you are deciding on the content of the environmental dialogue. Your sales representatives can tell you which customers are interested in environmental matters and the kind of questions they ask. When you talk to your sales representatives you must make sure you have the same perception of environment. Otherwise, you risk not getting relevant questions from the customers because the sales representatives do not think that they are about environmental matters – for example, use and disposal of products.
The suppliers' interest in environmental matters is another area you should investigate. Through their supplies they influence the company's environmental performance. It is the purchasing department that is in daily contact with the suppliers. Ask the department what environmental questions the suppliers want to discuss. Perhaps one supplier wants to sell less environmentally harmful products, while another has a proposal for reducing packaging.
3.3 Describe your proposals
Before drawing up the company's proposals you should obtain documentation on the company's possibility of meeting the stakeholders' wishes. On the basis of the documentation, note beside each of the stakeholders' wishes whether it is financially and technically possible to meet it.
The documentation can be internal data for the activities and the products' environmental impacts. However, it can also be studies carried out by others of the environmental aspects during the life cycle of the products. As environmental manager you will already have access to a lot of this information. If the stakeholders want to discuss matters that the company has not yet mapped, you must weigh the resources you will need to obtain the information against the importance of the question to the stakeholder and the stakeholder's importance to the company.
When you have a picture of the possibilities you must consider whether there are proposals that the company might be interested in bringing into the dialogue, but that the stakeholder in question has not actually asked for. Find out why the stakeholder has not expressed an interest in the matter himself. If it is because the stakeholder is not aware of the problem or does not know the company's possibilities, the solution could be more information and dialogue. In that case, you can add to the schedule the proposals the company can make.