Stakeholder engagement

Employees and contractors are among our most important stakeholders and with them dialogue and interaction is continuous. We carry out periodical employee satisfaction surveys to reveal strengths and weaknesses and identify areas in which we can improve the working environment, in terms of career paths, training, motivation and work-life balance.  These surveys give us a good indication of the success of our efforts to make our organizational process more efficient.

Dialogue with clients is achieved either through the placing agents or more directly via online questionnaires and telephone interviews.

We directly polled our private and institutional clients to measure their satisfaction with our services. What emerged was that they wanted to know more about our financing activities across the country; as a result every year we include in our Integrated Financial Statements a case history of one of the projects backed by the microfinance and crowdfunding fund.

Thanks to clients’ recommendations, we have implemented richer web site functions, such as the Private Area which gives every client clearer visibility of their position or the option to choose the dematerialization of paper communications to reduce environmental damage.

We have strengthened our relationship with suppliers through ISO 90012015 quality certification, where we revised the accreditation requisites and distinguished between “critical” and “non-critical” suppliers.

With critical suppliers we held meetings and examined our socio-environmental reporting process, reinforcing the concepts outlined in the Code of Ethics that inspire our social responsibility policies. The suppliers expressed a high level of satisfaction with relations with the company, acknowledging that the shared values and a clear definition of expectations facilitate mutual collaboration.

Dialogue with companies is constructive and continual: besides attending shareholders’ meetings, we meet with many companies at least once a year, focusing primarily (but not only) on the Italian companies in our Investable Universe.

The companies recognise Etica Sgr’s authoritative position on social responsibility and, to varying degrees, show an interest in questions of sustainable and ethical investment and attention to improving their own practices.

Our dialogue with the community includes training initiatives, workshops, conventions and meetings on issues of ethical finance and sustainable development, as well as maintaining continual relations and communications with experts, journalists, advisors, academics and researchers, and the national and international financial community and trade unions.