PREAMBLE: AN ONGOING DIALOG WITH THE STAKEHOLDER

Relationships are sustained if the partners to the relationship remain in contact, whether by telephone, letter or email, or personal meetings. And your relationships with your stakeholders are no different. You need some form of ongoing dialog with each of the stakeholder groups. The frequency and nature of the dialog may vary, but it has to take place.

The generic process for managing Stakeholder Value provides an ideal vehicle for a constructive dialog. Indeed, a communications plan is an essential concomitant of a properly implemented Value management process, and we’ll discuss this explicitly in Section 13.6 below. The most compelling example of such a dialog is a People Value process (although the same applies to all the other stakeholder groups), so it’s helpful to look at the steps in the process (Exhibits 13.1 and 13.2) to see the dialog developing (Exhibit 13.3).

Experience with this process confirms strongly that, even in the most hostile of environments (e.g. a university)

• there is a large initial and beneficial impact of involving people in the design of the instrument, they enjoy the Focus Groups2 and also tell other people what they’ve been doing and why; and

• people will continue to participate in follow-up surveys provided that management responds to the results promptly and sensibly.