Board’s Role in Stakeholder Engagement: Who, What, When, and How

Boards played an important role in helping management identify and engage with the right stakeholders, fostering transparency, accountability, and trust.

Understanding stakeholders and implementing formal methods to gather their views helped boards incorporate stakeholder interests into strategic decisions and was vital in establishing and maintaining trust. The discussion explored whether companies that engaged with their stakeholders had a competitive advantage during times of crisis.

Key questions included:

• Who should have participated in stakeholder engagement?

• What were some of the common challenges companies faced in engaging stakeholders, and how could they overcome these challenges?

• When should engagement have occurred?

• How had shareholder engagement evolved?

• How should boards have approached engagement with other stakeholders?

• How should boards have determined who their most important stakeholders were?

• How had broader stakeholder issues impacted engagement with institutional shareholders?

• How could boards maximize the benefits of engagement?

• How could boards measure the effectiveness of stakeholder engagement?

The event offered participants the opportunity to join in person or virtually for an interactive panel discussion on the board's role in stakeholder engagement, exploring who to engage, what to discuss, when to engage, and how to do so effectively.