Social Impact & Volunteering

Assessing the Effectiveness of Our New Community Response System at Eleonore

Jul 25, 2018 11:00 AM ET
Campaign: Together, Creating Sustainable Value

In an effort to increase collaboration and transparency, our Éléonore operation formally established a site-based grievance mechanism in 2016 using the principles set out in our Sustainability Excellence Management System (SEMS). Through discussions with our Cree Nation of Wemindji partners, a joint decision was made to refer to it as a “dialogue mechanism,” with the intent of facilitating meaningful conversations with our stakeholders. In 2017, Éléonore volunteered to pilot a new internal tool developed by the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) team to assess the effectiveness of the dialogue mechanism.

Through a collaborative process, Éléonore employed an independent student from a regional university to conduct 29 interviews (phone and in-person) with stakeholders from Éléonore’s social area of influence. Using the results of the interviews, we assessed important aspects of the site’s dialogue mechanism such as its accessibility, predictability and transparency.

Some of the high-level results of the assessment include:

  • 95% of interviewed stakeholders have previously communicated with Éléonore;
  • 40% of interviewed stakeholders knew that there is a documented procedure for submitting feedback;
  • 80% of interviewed stakeholders did not know the mechanism by its name;
  • 53% of interviewed stakeholders did not know that there are different channels to communicate with the site;
  • 80% of interviewed stakeholders thought that unique channels were needed for different stakeholders to communicate;
  • 80% of interviewed stakeholders were comfortable to communicate with Éléonore and were not afraid of retaliation; and
  • Preferred means of communication with Éléonore were:
    In person > By phone > By email > Formal letters > Texts.

From this feedback we realized we have an opportunity to better engage and communicate with our stakeholders on the dialogue mechanism. First, by ensuring we are clearly communicating how the dialogue mechanism works and second, by ensuring we are clearly communicating why we have a formalized process for receiving, investigating and responding to feedback.

Through this survey we were also able to learn the specific communication channels that certain stakeholders prefer and trust. Using this valuable data, the Éléonore CSR team was able to develop an improvement plan to focus on these areas of opportunity, improve the effectiveness of the dialogue mechanism and continue to build and strengthen relationships with our stakeholders. Due to the success of the pilot project, in 2018 we will work with our other sites to implement this assessment process.

“We designed this tool to continually evolve our site’s grievance mechanism to ensure we are allowing for accessible, transparent and effective communication with our stakeholders,” commented Phil Casey, Manager, Corporate Social Responsibility. “Éléonore took great initiative in piloting the new tool and we will continue to refine it moving forward so that it can support all Goldcorp sites”.

For more information on our stakeholder engagement and collaboration practices at our sites, visit the 2017 Sustainability Report.

Goldcorp Inc.