Leadership through optimized stakeholder dialogs.

To coordinate our myriad dialog activities, we designated responsibilities at the corporate and national company level in 2008. We appointed managers for specific CR topics and embedded stakeholder dialog in our CR management. In December 2008, we joined forces with other specialist departments to begin structuring of our dialog activities, drawing up a CR communication and a dialog concept. Our objective is to improve our CR performance profile and increase notice by the general public.

Analyses are the foundation for good dialog.
During our appraisal of the situation, we identified ten main stakeholder segments, including suppliers, employees, residents, customers and numerous sub-groups, to which we assigned different success factors and communication channels. Following this, we evaluated existed dialog activities pursued to date in the individual segments. We did so by interviewing internal and external stakeholders and evaluating relevant market research studies. The CR communication and dialog concept that we subsequently drew up described formal and contentual requirement profiles for the three core instruments of our CR communication (printed CR Report, CR Online Report and the Group's “Corporate Responsibility” Portal) and other CR media.

Professional dialog management.
We want to continue to optimize our stakeholder dialogs and become an international leader in CR. To achieve this, we have embarked on the development of a stakeholder management system. It is designed to facilitate a proactive exchange with internal and external stakeholders and to help us maintain systematic stakeholder dialogs and bring our external CR communication into line with them. We anticipate that the management system will provide greater transparency in stakeholder communication and important information on the factors that lead to successful dialogs in the medium term.