The importance placed on understanding stakeholder behaviours and attitudes has never been more important. Being able to understand stakeholder’s beliefs gives a basis of knowledge on how to effectively manage the relationship with them. There is also a need for obtaining feedback from key stakeholders to ensure they are having their needs met, while still having a positive impact on the business.
What is a Stakeholder?
Before we get into the real discussion of the importance of stakeholder consultation lets remind ourselves of what a stakeholder is.
Simply, a stakeholder is anyone who has dealings with your business or can affect its success. They can generally be split into two groups – internal and external.
- Internal stakeholders: come from within the organisation. Such as employees, managers, and owners.
- External stakeholders: come from outside the organisation. Such as suppliers, customers, and business partners.
Stakeholder Mapping
Stakeholders can then be mapped based on their influence and interest in the business, to identify how to effectively manage the relationship with each one.
I would like to focus this discussion on our customers who sit in the ‘actively engage’ section of the matrix, with high interest, and high influence in our business; and the importance stakeholder consultation plays in keeping our customers actively engaged in any training process. It is essential we manage our relationships with customers effectively, to ensure customer satisfaction, but it also allows us to build a basis for future collaboration and partnerships.
What do we mean by stakeholder consultation?
Stakeholder consultation involves the development of trusting and mutually beneficial relationships over the long term. It enables us to identify trends and emerging challenges which are currently affecting an organisation and their staff or have the potential to in the future. Actively listening to stakeholder concerns and feedback is extremely valuable to us as a business and helps us to identify and control risks.
Our Approach to Stakeholder Consultation
During consultation with customers, we invite them to educate us on their culture, values, and general concerns. They can ask questions and help provide a basis for our starting point in creating learning interventions for them by making suggestions and providing specific examples for us to build case studies around, to make the training as effective as possible.
The 4 main steps to stakeholder consultation:
- Planning. Who are the organisation – what are the objectives, and expectations? What do we need to find out? Are there any specific questions we need to ask? Do they have any specific examples of behaviour which will help us with creating the most effective learning interventions? This allows us to prepare for the consultation to find out exactly what we need to know in order to begin creating a training outline.
- Process. Resources and timing – how many sessions does the organisation require for it to be an effective learning intervention? How long will we have to prepare for the training? Do we require any further resources? Who will be present during the consultation and who will record the data collected?
- Presentation. Analysis of the data – what do we know about the organisation from the information we have collected? Which approach is going to best suit the organisation and their needs? Create a training outline and proposal and report back to the organisation
- Promise. This is what happens after the consultation process. What are we offering them? What value do we feel we can add? What return on investment are the organisation going to gain? Do both parties feel this is a good fit?
The Impact
Involving the customer throughout the consultation process, allowing them to give their input, ideas, and feedback, helps them feel valued and listened to. We pride ourselves in being personable and adapting our approach to suit any need or requirement. It is essential to us that the customer feels we have had an impact on their staff, and their objectives have been met, or better yet, exceeded.
For us, stakeholder consultation doesn’t end once the training has been delivered. We believe the key to long-lasting learning interventions, and positive behaviour change within the workplace, is to gain feedback at intervals after the training. For example, we have recently developed a 6-month post-training questionnaire for our customers which identifies the impact of the training they received, and whether they require any further support. Keeping in touch with customers, and extending your support further than required, is what we believe to be the best way to gain the trust of the organisation and pave the way for future collaboration.
Laying these foundations will help to build strong, long-lasting relationships with customers, provide an insight into trends in issues within organisations, and offer feedback to allow us to identify our strengths, and where we could make some changes in order to give our customers the best experience possible.
