The Warning Was There. Who Was Listening?
Reading time: 5 minutes
How is listening linked to resilience and sustainability?
An employee raises concerns about unsafe working conditions. A supplier reports growing water shortages. A community complains about pollution near your operations.
Each concern points to something that deserves attention. It may reveal harm that is already happening, an impact that could become more serious, or a dependency your business has underestimated.
Listening gives you an opportunity to investigate and respond while you still have options. That is where stakeholder engagement connects sustainability with resilience.
The connection starts with people and the environment
Sustainability involves understanding and addressing a business’s impacts on the economy, the environment and people, including their human rights. Under the GRI Standards, material topics represent an organisation’s most significant impacts (GRI, 2021a). globalreporting.org
Resilience concerns a business’s ability to prepare for disruption, adapt and continue operating.
The two can be closely connected. Unsafe working conditions can harm employees and undermine operational continuity. Pollution can damage ecosystems and relationships with communities. Water scarcity can affect people locally while exposing a business’s dependence on a constrained resource.
The harm matters even before it creates a financial problem for the business. Understanding that harm can also reveal where the business needs to change its decisions, practices or relationships.
Imagine the warning arriving in three different places
Consider this hypothetical example.
A manufacturer’s procurement team hears that a supplier is struggling with water availability. The supplier also acknowledges concerns about its wastewater management.
Meanwhile, local residents raise complaints about discharges near the supplier’s site. Within the manufacturer, production staff notice increasingly inconsistent deliveries.
Procurement sees a supply issue. Sustainability sees an environmental concern. Production sees a scheduling problem.
If nobody connects the information, each team may deal with its own immediate difficulty while the underlying problem continues.
A shared review could prompt questions that change the response:
- What is happening to local water resources and the people who depend on them?
- Is the supplier causing or contributing to pollution?
- How is the manufacturer connected to these impacts through its business relationship?
- What prevention, mitigation or remediation is needed?
- What would happen to production if the supplier could no longer operate?
The answers could lead to engagement with the supplier, environmental investigation, changes to purchasing practices and contingency planning.
Finding another supplier might protect deliveries, but it would not, by itself, resolve harm connected to the existing relationship.
Stakeholder engagement brings missing information into view
Employees, supplier workers, customers and communities can experience impacts that management does not see directly.
An incident figure may tell you how many injuries were recorded. Conversations with workers may reveal whether near misses go unreported or whether people feel safe raising concerns.
A supplier questionnaire may describe environmental procedures. Community engagement may reveal questions about how those procedures work in practice.
GRI 2 treats stakeholder engagement as part of an organisation’s ongoing activities. GRI 3 explains how engagement with relevant stakeholders and experts informs the identification and assessment of impacts (GRI, 2021b; GRI, 2021c). globalreporting.org
The practical implication is straightforward: do not wait for the next reporting cycle to listen.
Feedback needs to reach the people who can investigate it, assess its significance and take action.
The loudest concern is not always the most significant
Businesses need to avoid equating visibility with importance.
A powerful customer may receive an immediate response. A temporary worker or a small community may struggle to get heard, even when the potential harm is severe.
GRI 3 recognises barriers to engagement, including language differences and power imbalances. Actual negative impacts are assessed by severity; potential negative impacts by severity and likelihood. For potential negative human rights impacts, severity takes precedence over likelihood (GRI, 2021c). globalreporting.org
For a business, this means looking beyond the volume of complaints.
Who might be affected but unable to speak freely? Whose experience is missing? Does a single concern point to serious harm that needs prompt investigation?
Turn listening into action
A practical response can begin with five steps.
- Choose one important activity or business relationship.
Start with a supplier, site, product or process where impacts or dependencies deserve closer attention.
- Identify who experiences the impacts.
Include people affected by the activity, alongside those who influence commercial decisions. Consider whether workers, communities or other groups need accessible or confidential ways to raise concerns.
- Bring the signals together.
Review relevant complaints, incident reports, employee feedback, supplier discussions and operational information. Record uncertainty and distinguish allegations from verified findings.
- Assign responsibility and agree when to escalate.
Name the person responsible for reviewing the concern and the action required. A credible indication of serious harm should prompt timely investigation; it should not have to become a recurring pattern first.
- Check whether the response worked.
Track whether harm has stopped or reduced, whether affected people consider the response effective, and whether the business has addressed the underlying cause. Where appropriate, explain to those who raised the concern what action followed.
These steps help turn engagement into decisions that can be reviewed and improved.
What should this mean for your sustainability report?
A report becomes more useful when it explains the connection between an impact, the action taken and the evidence of progress.
For example, a business could explain that worker feedback revealed a safety concern, what investigation established, how responsibilities were assigned and how the effectiveness of corrective action was checked.
GRI Disclosure 3-3 addresses how an organisation manages its material topics, including actions, tracking effectiveness and how stakeholder engagement informs those actions (GRI, 2021c). globalreporting.org
Reporting can therefore provide an opportunity to examine whether the management response is working. The underlying listening and action must continue throughout the year.
Three questions for your next management meeting
- What have employees, suppliers or communities told us that we have not yet properly investigated?
- Which concerns could reveal significant harm, an important dependency or both?
- Who is responsible for acting, and how will we know the response has worked?
You do not need to predict every disruption. You do need a way to recognise information that deserves attention.
Your next warning may already be sitting in an inbox, a staff meeting or a supplier conversation. Who is listening, and what happens next?
Build the skills to connect impacts with decisions
FBRH’s Learn How to Prepare a 1st Class GRI Sustainability Report course helps participants apply materiality best practice and use enhanced materiality to connect significant impacts, sustainability related risks and opportunities, and business decisions.
Participants develop a practical plan for preparing a GRI Standards report, helping them move from identifying what matters to assigning responsibilities, gathering evidence and reviewing progress. fbrh.co.uk
Simon Pitsillides
Simon Pitsillides is a board adviser specialising in sustainability governance, corporate reporting, strategy and stakeholder value creation. He supports boards and senior executives in strengthening governance, enhancing decision-making and integrating sustainability into long-term business strategy.
Simon is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (FCIM), a Fellow of the Institute of Sustainability and Environmental Professionals (FISEP), a Chartered Marketer, and holds an MBA in Marketing. He is also a GRI and ISEP Certified Trainer.
As Founder of FBRH Consultants and publisher of SustainCase, Simon combines strategic, commercial and governance expertise with extensive international experience in sustainability reporting, assurance readiness and value creation. He has worked with multinational organisations, financial institutions and public sector bodies across Europe, the Middle East and beyond.
Simon is recognised for helping boards move beyond compliance by using decision-useful sustainability information to strengthen strategy, manage risk, build stakeholder confidence and create long-term value for business, stakeholders and the planet.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-pitsillides
References
Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) (2021a) GRI 1: Foundation 2021. Available at: GRI website (Accessed: 5 October 2026).
Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) (2021b) GRI 2: General Disclosures 2021. Available at: GRI website (Accessed: 5 October 2026).
Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) (2021c) GRI 3: Material Topics 2021. Available at: GRI website (Accessed: 5 October 2026).