Responsibility requires knowledge of expectations

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) covers a very wide territory. This is both a blessing and a curse at the same time. On the one hand, corporate social responsibility has an extremely broad range of applications – from sustainable management and products with environmental value added through to involvement of relevant social groups. On the other hand, one can lose oneself in this broad expanse of choices without clear guidance.

To ensure this did not occur to Vienna Insurance Group with its many important social connections, the Group set out to involve major stakeholders in identifying the main social, environmental and economic issues for the Group. A multi-stage analysis process was initiated so that Vienna Insurance Group’s social contribution could not only be identified, but also checked for significance with stakeholders, amended and improved, taking into account existing requirements.

To begin the process, a list of potentially relevant corporate social responsibility topics was prepared from the following sources: future statutory requirements, criteria based on international standards, analysis of internal documents, reports by international peers and requirements for sustainability ratings. This was followed by an internal workshop where the individual issues were examined for relevance to Vienna Insurance Group and assigned to separate topic areas.

In the middle of September 2016, an online questionnaire based on this preliminary work was sent to internal stakeholders (employees, management) and our external interest groups, consisting of large clients, distribution partners, investors, analysts, political stakeholders, NGOs, various experts, the media and suppliers. The questionnaire asked respondents to rank the collected topics in the topic areas according to their importance for future sustainability reporting and then to rank the topic areas themselves. Major topic areas included “sustainable business practices”, “product and customer responsibility”, “dealing with the environment”, “dealing with employees” and “involving and developing society”, each with between two and six sub-topics. Around 770 respondents took advantage of the opportunity to provide their opinions.

The results show that the weights and priorities assigned by management are close to those assigned by employees and external stakeholders. Both groups rated long-term stability and profitable growth as the most important issue for corporate social responsibility. Customer satisfaction took second place, followed closely by social and environmental factors in the business strategy. The boxes show the ranking of all topics with the highest priority.

At Vienna Insurance Group, we consider the stakeholder survey and assessment of the materiality of topics to be the first step in the Group’s future development with regard to corporate social responsibility. It provides us with important guidance for our future direction that Vienna Insurance Group will examine closely in the current year.