A number of software packages have appeared in recent months, designed to help companies manage their reputation by assessing and monitoring their relationships with stakeholders – variously defined as including shareholders, customers, employees, partners, society and even the environment. Typically the packages take the form of a CD-Rom or PC disks whose purpose is to quantify, manage and improve corporate responsibility and accountability in a systematic way.
The Reputation Assurance RA5 software from PricewaterhouseCoopers helps a company to measure its performance in four ‘key’ areas of corporate responsibility – stewardship, environment, health and safety and communication. The company’s performance relative to five stakeholder groups – shareholders, customers, employees, society and partners – is then evaluated in these key areas within a matrix.
Company staff trained by PwC to act as ‘self assessors’ collect relevant information to fit into this framework. They can link the software to the company intranet and to the world wide web, and access a PwC knowledge base for best practice and benchmarking data.
With the data in place, users can analyse the results in several ways. They can assess the performance of an individual business unit, for example, or compare the performance of units in different countries. They can also examine the quality of management processes across an entire business.
Companies often find it hard to decide on a framework and what data they should collect; the real value of this package is its coherent framework and its ability to guide users through the process of self assessment.
The IntraSight Assessment tool developed by Arthur Andersen takes a quite different approach. It focuses on a single stakeholder group – employees – and uses confidential surveys to build up a picture of how employees perceive the company’s attitudes to ethics. The assessment process is paper rather than software-based because confidentiality is needed when carrying out surveys in this sensitive area, the professional services firm says.
The data collected sheds light on whether existing ethics and compliance programmes are effective or giving value for money. IntraSight Assessment also enables companies to maintain standards and measure improvement, and is a ‘quick and cost effective way to provide the measurements you need to start, expand or evaluate an ethics/compliance programme’, claims Arthur Andersen. A basic assessment can be completed in three to four months.
Assessing the likely public response to a project can be costly and take a long time. The Outrage Management Prediction software, developed by the risk and reputation consultancy Dames & Moore, focuses on how stakeholders are likely to react. The ‘technical’ risks of a course of action are distinguished from the ‘outrage’ it may produce among stakeholder groups: the software helps to predict and manage the outrage, which may be fuelled by stakeholder misconceptions. Outrage has been developed with the leading risk communication consultant Peter Sandman, who advised Shell after Brent Spa.
Users are presented with situations in which they can identify and analyse key stakeholders and examine what motivates any potential critics. Outrage uses 227 questions to evaluate a possible course of action according to 12 risk factors. Both questions and factors are weighted according to their relative importance and also according to Sandman’s intuition of how important they are.
‘Our approach to helping you manage outrage is to help you experiment with different levels of change so you can decide the cost-effective solution that can work within your organization,’ says Dames & Moore.