Investors and other stakeholders are influenced by a company’s reputation and the respect and trust it has earned. Reputation rankings published in business magazines are frequently based, partly, on publicly available sustainability information.

As a consequence, there are always concerns about how much a company’s reputation might be damaged by public disclosure on potential risks or bad news, and the natural instinct is for organizations to avoid such disclosure. However, reporting both good and bad news can build trust and respect  Tweet This!. Stakeholders are more likely to give a company the benefit of the doubt if the company is honest and open about its performance, even if it is not very good.

Experience shows that dishonesty about a company’s weaknesses, which in the current context of worldwide, instant digital connection may be revealed through many communication channels, tends to damage a company’s reputation more than the open and honest treatment of weaknesses in a sustainability report.

 


Also see:  The main benefits of sustainability reporting


 

Companies found that sustainability reporting often helped achieve better stakeholder relations and increased trust, which in turn leads to other advantages:

• Growing brand value and developing customer loyalty
• Increasing market share
• Gaining improved access to capital, and a lower cost of capital
• Enhancing community license to operate
• Streamlining regulatory approvals

 

 

According to Francisco Ravenna, Agronomist, Viña Huelquén Ltds, Chile (SME), “when we report we can show the quality of our products and services, improve the image of the company and gain reputation.”

 

References:

This article was compiled using a publication by GRI. For the sake of readability, we did not use brackets or ellipses but made sure that the extra or missing words did not change the publication’s meaning. If you would like to quote these written sources from the original please revert to the link below:

https://www.globalreporting.org/resourcelibrary/Starting-Points-2-G3.1.pdf