Changing investor priorities
Customer relations is the stakeholder issue IROs are most likely to have had discussions with investors about, with more than six in 10 having done so in the past 12 months.
A majority of respondents have discussed government and regulatory engagement and public health measures with investors, while exactly half have discussed supply-chain relations and carbon-neutrality goals.
Only two stakeholder concerns identified here have been discussed by fewer than four in 10 IROs in the past year: resource management and socio-economic development.
This is in marked contrast to company reporting, with resource management and socio-economic development (as well as employee relations) being the most common stakeholder issues for companies to have reported on in the past year. Customer relations, meanwhile, is one of the issues least commonly reported on.
When IROs are asked how interested investors are in each identified stakeholder issue, government and regulatory engagement tops the list, followed by customer relations and carbon-neutrality. Overall, there is a 52 percentage-point difference between IROs who think investors have an above-neutral interest in government & regulatory engagement and those who give it a below-neutral score. These three issues, along with supply-chain relations and public relations & corporate reputation, all have a majority registering above the neutral score of five on a scale of 0 to 10.
The level of interest IROs perceive investors to have in these issues broadly matches the level of discussions they have with them – with two notable exceptions. While the number of IROs who have recently had discussions with investors on public health measures is comparatively high, the level of interest they consider investors to have in the issue is comparatively low. Conversely, there are relatively fewer discussions with investors about PR & corporate reputation, yet IROs consider it one of the most important stakeholder issues for investors.
According to IROs, all identified areas of stakeholder concern have seen increased interest from investors in the past five years. The issue that has seen the greatest increase in interest is carbon-neutrality, with more than seven in 10 IROs registering an increase in investor interest, including a third registering a strong increase.
Other areas of high increased interest are government and regulatory engagement, public health measures and resource management & waste.
There is negligible indication of decreased interest by investors, with no IROs registering a strong decrease in investor interest on any issue.
There are just three areas where the majority of respondents have seen no change in investor interest during this time: customer relations, employee relations and public relations & corporate reputation.
While just under a third of IROs agree that stakeholder issues are only a priority as long as shareholders deem them to be material, half of IROs disagree with this statement, with a quarter strongly disagreeing. IROs at smaller companies are slightly more likely to agree with this statement than those at larger companies.
Almost as many European IROs agree as disagree that shareholder priorities should determine stakeholder interest. North American IROs are the most likely to disagree with the statement, while three in 10 Asian IROs remain neutral on the subject.
