Actors have been drafted in to play the role of stakeholders at British American Tobacco.
The multinational group has recruited the thespians to help train managers internally before they start talking to stakeholders.
‘The primary benefit of the actor training is for managers to gain an understanding of the emotional difficulties of dialogue, rather than to learn the intellectual aspects of the issues,’ said BAT’s social accountability manager David O’Reilly.
‘They’re not there to replace real stakeholders, but to play hypothetical roles. They get a brief on an organization and its role, mission, and attitudes, and play a representative from it.’
O’Reilly said: ‘Dialogue is a good management discipline generally, and not only for those who are taking part in social reporting-based dialogue with external stakeholders. Our day-to-day management meetings have greatly improved as a result.’
He added that the idea had emerged at UK headquarters a couple of years ago, when he first started training the company’s social reporting managers. ‘Some of our internal managers played the roles of various stakeholders to try and find out what dialogue was all about,’ he said.
BAT says that although at first it was sometimes difficult to engage stakeholders in dialogue, particularly in the UK, the number of groups it is now talking to has risen ‘significantly in terms of inclusivity and completeness’.
‘If anything, because of the increased amount of engagement, the use of actor-based dialogue training is going to increase in the company rather than decline,’ said O’Reilly. ‘Many of our end markets are starting to use them as well.’
Kenneth Clarke, deputy chairman of BAT, told a recent meeting of the UK’s All Party Parliamentary Group on Corporate Social Responsibility that he had detected signs of a change in relations between the company and its critics, including even the most trenchant ones.
‘We’ve reached a stage with some stakeholders where they want to meet us in secret so long as nobody knows we’re having a dialogue,’ he said. ‘We’re getting a wider circle of responsible people who are critics, but who wish to come in to make points to us about social responsibility.’