Stakeholder engagement, as a method to obtain stakeholder’s opinions and focus areas, is an essential part of preparing the sustainability report under the GRI framework, which could assist companies to establish the sustainability strategies that suit own development models based on stakeholders’ expectations.
Stakeholders are the entities or individuals that can reasonably be expected to be significantly affected by the reporting organization’s activities, products, and services, or whose actions can reasonably be expected to affect the ability of the organisation to implement its strategies and achieve its objectives.
The reporting principles linked to stakeholder engagement in GRI Standards are stakeholder inclusiveness and materiality. Stakeholder inclusiveness entails that the reporting organization shall identify its stakeholders and explain how it has responded to their reasonable expectations and interests, while the principle of materiality refers to the reporting organization shall identify the key stakeholder groups with which it engages itself.
The reporting process for stakeholder engagement normally encompasses the following five steps, which are:
- Benchmarking and gap analysis regarding stakeholder engagement
- Identification and prioritisation of various stakeholder groups
- Design stakeholder engagement plan
- Perform stakeholder engagement
- Collect and analyse information
