The issue
The client, a blue-chip company headquartered in Hong Kong, sought to maintain a strong and positive reputation. The company asked a team of PricewaterhouseCoopers sustainability professionals to identify possible gaps between stakeholders’ perception of the organisation and the actual performance of the company in terms of its policies and practices, management systems, and financial standing.
Our approach
A team from PricewaterhouseCoopers proposed that the client develop a stakeholder engagement framework to understand the issues affecting the market’s views of the organisation and manage its relationships with stakeholders. As a first step towards setting this framework, PricewaterhouseCoopers conducted a “reputation review” whose objectives were to:
- Map and prioritise the client’s key stakeholders
- Understand the gaps between key stakeholders’ perception and the client’s performance and formulate recommendations for addressing reputation gaps.
Implementation of the framework was designed to fit with the organisation’s sustainability reporting cycle as this reporting is potentially a valuable tool with which to influence stakeholders’ views.
The outcome
As a result of PricewaterhouseCoopers work, the client was provided with:
- A clear understanding of the key issues driving stakeholder perceptions
- A detailed analysis of the client’s priority stakeholders that included the ranking of stakeholders’ concerns and identification of gaps between stakeholders’ perceptions and the organisation’s actual performance
- Recommendations for addressing the identified reputation gaps
- A keen awareness of the challenges in sustaining an effective stakeholder engagement framework
