International stakeholder survey
Handling our stakeholders’ Expectations
MAN’s stakeholders have a wide variety of expectations for the Company. This provides us with important input for our corporate strategy and helps us to identify opportunities and risks. We can only maintain trust and acceptance by taking stakeholder concerns seriously and addressing them in our business practices. That is why stakeholders and their interests play an important role in our Guiding Principles.
We use a variety of channels to communicate with our stakeholders and to discover and analyze their expectations. In 2011 we not only carried out a Groupwide employee survey, but our second international stakeholder survey as well. Our 2010 CR Report included a questionnaire that allowed readers to provide us with direct feedback — as does this report.
Identifying stakeholder expectations and new challenges is the responsibility of the CR Excellence Team. All MAN divisions are charged with integrating these diverse needs into our business processes and mediating when conflicts of interest arise.
International stakeholder survey
In 2010 we conducted our first webbasedinternational stakeholder survey. We repeated and expanded the process in the year under review. Of the almost 500 stakeholders selected (2010: approx. 400), around 40% responded to the questionnaire. So although the participation rate was similar to that of the previous year, the overall number of replies increased from almost 140 to 192. The largest number of responses came from Germany (30%); 14% were from China and 11% from Brazil.
Challenges for MAN
As in the previous year, resource conservation (73%) and climate change (61%) were identified by participating stakeholders as the greatest challenges facing MAN — although the relevance of climate change as a challenge was rated eight percentage points lower this time. 38% of respondents (2010: 49%) still consider globalization to be an issue that MAN must address. The percentage of participants who see diversity and equal opportunity as a challenge for MAN rose from 27 to 34%.
Assessment of our CR activities
The majority of our stakeholders rated MAN’s CR activities as appropriate or above average. They attested to the Company’s great commitment to product responsibility and compliance. The aspects most frequently rated as weak concerned our performance in the categories of community involvement & corporate citizenship and employees. However, more than three-quarters of all stakeholders believe that MAN has a credible approach to sustainable business practices.