A leading innovative medicines company aiming to become the most trusted company in its sector globally, was required by its Board Risk Committee to ensure compliance with governance standards in more fully considering the interests of its stakeholders in decision-making.
While the company had established processes for materiality impact assessment and regularly surveyed certain of its stakeholders on specific topics, no board or executive committee level aggregate stakeholder insight was in place.
We recommended the establishment of a new mechanism for company leadership to review stakeholder concerns and prioritise company actions around emerging core issues. A new Trust Task Force, led by the Global Head of External Communications, was convened to spearhead the work, including Linq Advisors as the sole external consulting partner.
Through a new strategic framework centred around the Trust ambition and its corporate strategy derived components, we implemented a solution including regular intelligence and implications reporting to the executive committee and in-market leadership teams. It provides escalation protocols for the Risk Committee involvement in specific reputation risk levels and issues, thus further strengthening the board’s compliance with OECD board compliance norms and national regulatory standards.
Multiple divisional and market-level operational adjustments were made as a result of the new approach. These include practices in sustainable packaging, pricing and diversity in trials, all enabling strengthened trust building and lowering future regulatory risk. After a calibration period the approach now runs in house, with our ad hoc consultative support where required.
