BUILDING CONSTRUCTIVE RELATIONSHIPS AND SOCIAL TRUST

Social trust is built by being inclusive, transparent, and accountable, as well as through an unwavering commitment to developing and maintaining constructive stakeholder relationships, understanding and addressing concerns and expectations, and embedding stakeholder input into the decisions you make and the way you operate. EEM’s stakeholder & aboriginal engagement services can help organizations achieve these goals and develop manageable and consistent engagement approaches that are appropriate to your organization's context.

Services

Engagement strategy and planning

  • Design an appropriate stakeholder and aboriginal engagement strategy in line with your organization's context, capabilities, standards, budget, and stakeholder landscape;
  • Plan phased implementation to ensure that your engagement strategy is deliverable and manageable;
  • Assess internal and external resource requirements and identify any skills and capacity gaps that may be required to execute your strategy;
  • Leverage proven tools and techniques (including online-based), and collaborative processes.

Regulatory consultation

  • Raise your organization's awareness of regulatory public consultation requirements and develop appropriate engagement programs;
  • Ensure constructive dialogue and enable your organization to focus on content rather than process by using independent consultation facilitation;
  • Demonstrate accountability to authorities with rigourous documentation and reporting on key social performance indicators.

Community investment orientation

  • Ensure alignment between business objectives and community priorities with a clear and transparent community social investment policy, a multi-stakeholder process that feeds into the determination of investment orientation and prioritization, and a governance framework for ongoing management and oversight;
  • Develop appropriate key performance indicators for investment and resource inputs, partnership project outputs, and community social development outcomes so as to measure the return on your organization's community social investment;
  • Track and report all monetary and non-monetary contributions and develop value added reporting that integrates into traditional financial and performance reporting.

Stakeholder engagement facilitation

  • Maximize the effectiveness and outcomes of your organization's engagement programs by leveraging EEM’s cutting edge expertise in public involvement, aboriginal relations, facilitated process, and collaborative planning;
  • Build social trust and accountability by adopting appropriate mechanisms for equitable, transparent, systematic, and two-way dialogue;
  • Leverage EEM’s front-line skills, repository of engagement tools, and best practices experience to improve understanding of operations or project-related issues and opportunities, to communicate plans and gather input, and to collaboratively address mutual priorities;
  • Where applicable, utilize independent facilitation to enable your organization to focus on content rather than process and to be a stakeholder rather than convenor;
  • Benefit from EEM’s ‘accompaniment’ approach and its inherent professional development and performance improvement capacity.

Stakeholder & aboriginal relations training

  • Build the stakeholder engagement, aboriginal relations, and community development capabilities of your internal personnel with a view to sustained, social performance excellence;
  • Develop training, induction, awareness-raising, and internal engagement programs on stakeholder and aboriginal relations for related organizational functions such as human resources, environment, health & safety, project development, business development, and communications, among others.

Information and performance management

  • Provide assurance that issues are being managed effectively and responsibly and that stakeholder expectations are being met;
  • Secure and centralize stakeholder-related information and deliver multi-level social performance reporting;
  • Digest stakeholder and aboriginal relations information and integrate it with existing management systems (e.g. EMS complaints registry; ISO 26000 risk register);
  • Ensure appropriate and timely flow of information and reporting in your organization's EMS or SMS (e.g. ISO 26000);
  • Map internal interdepartmental communication needs/requirements and ensure an appropriate and timely flow of stakeholder and aboriginal engagement information.

Products

EEM offers the following turnkey stakeholder and aboriginal engagement consulting packages to its clients:

  • Social Performance Diagnostic
  • Community Needs Assessment

Case Studies

  • Community engagement planning

    EEM worked with a mining client to develop a multi-year community relations plan aligned with community needs.

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  • Community Investment Planning

    EEM worked with a major copper mining and refining operation to devise a system for participatory prioritisation of multi-year community investment spending.

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  • Land management planning community engagement

    EEM engaged with community stakeholders in the Kivalliq region of Nunavut to identify and incorporate key community issues and opportunities into a land management plan.

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