Workshop on Application of G4 in Reporting and Management Held in Beijing

source:goldencsr date:2016-04-01 14:14:15

On March 22 , Workshop on Application of G4 in Reporting and Management ,co-hosted by GoldenBee CSR Counsulting and TüV NORD, was held in Beijing. As the key part of the G4 China Reporting Leadership Program 2016, it attracted participants from Chinese and foreign enterprises in the field of Transportation, energy, food, and electronics.

Ms. Yibo DAI, Deputy General Manager of GoldenBee CSR Consulting gave an opening remark on behalf of program initiators. She said that G4 Guidelines have great impact on social responsibility disclosure of enterprises around the world since its launch in 2013. G4 Guidelines emphasize the identification of material issues and the disclosure on management approach, which also draw special attention from Chinese enterprises as they hope to use the international reporting language to further promote the communication and cooperation with the international peers.

Ms. Yibo DAI, Deputy General Manager of GoldenBee CSR Consulting gave the opening remark

Ms. DAI said, “The G4 China Reporting Leadership Program 2015 has built such a platform for enterprises and helped them achieve good results in the program. This has greatly promoted the professionalism and internationalization of Chinese social responsibility reports. ”

Since the program was launched last year, it has creatively integrated the process of CSR reporting and CSR communication at home and abroad as well as arranged training sessions and analysis of their previous years’ reports for participants. In addition, it strengthened the materiality of enterprises’ CSR reports, improved the application ability of the G4 Guidelines, promoted the international communication of reports and presented enterprises’ responsible corporate images through GRI Materiality Disclosures Service and Featured Report Service.

To further promote this program in 2016, Yuan Yuan, Senior Programme Coordinator of GRI China Regional Hub was invited to introduce the GRI Alignment Service for the trainees to help them better understand the background information of G4 Guidelines and relevant services.

As one of the highlights in this training, Dr. Glenn Frommer, Member of Working Group on DMA for the GRI G4, explained the application of G4 Guidelines in sustainability reporting and enterprise management. During the training, Dr. Frommer also explains how to improve the materiality and credibility of reporting with plenty of specific practices and tools by combing with his over 20 years of CSR management and reporting experience at MTR. As for the 7 stages of report preparation, Dr. Frommer focused on the provision of practical methods to help participants understand how to implement reporting through their functions in the company. Alongside that, he also shed light on how to integrate the goal of central government into the management operation and present the results in the report.

7 stages of report preparation

Meanwhile, Dr. Frommer mentioned that the key to reporting process improvement is to raise risk management awareness and build a top-down risk management system. Except the risk matrix as analysis tool to identify the severity of risks, he recommended to adopt the risk report released by World Economic Forum as the risk management support tool to conduct risk assessment.

Analysis Tool-Risk Matrix

He stressed that boundary scoping, materiality issues and stakeholder are the core of the reporting process. Sound communication skills and interpersonal relationship are critical to the reporting program and business operation.

On corporate practice, G4 Reporting also brings values for enterprises. As the representatives and beneficiaries of the Program 2015, Mr. Yue ZUO, Senior manager of China National Nuclear Power Company for brand management, stakeholder communication and social responsibility, shared the experience about how to do Materiality disclosure by combing the nuclear power industry characteristics and CNNP’s “CSR Four Force Model (Safety, Economy, Environment, Human)”. Mr. Fushun WU, CSR Director, China Mengniu Dairy Company Limited introduced the task allocation and collaboration during reporting in Mengniu Dairy and explained how to disclose management approach to promote the collaboration within the enterprise.

The speakers: Yue ZUO (First from right), Fushun WU (Second from right) and Julia HUANG (Third from right)

When applying GRI Guidelines, enterprise often find problems on the accuracy and reliability of information collection, which exactly reflects the problems in the corporate social responsibility management system. Ms. Julia HUANG, Project Manager of TüV NORD summarized the common problems and solutions for assurance of CSR reports. She said that the insufficient identification of the materiality content can be solved by different ways, like conducting survey on different stakeholders, benchmarking research, investigation and literature review.

At the end of training, Mr. Wei ZHUANG, Chief Creative Officer of GoldenBee Sustainable Brand Communication cited case studies to explain how to use a variety of communication methods to maximize the value of CSR report in the era of Internet Plus. He noted that the key is to transform the CSR report into communication elements and also introduced the four characteristics of CSR report communication.