Daimler Sustainability Strategy Takes the Expectations of Stakeholders into Account

Specifying fields of action
We evaluate a variety of sources in order to obtain as precise a picture of our stakeholders’ concerns as possible. This involves evaluating readers’ feedback regarding this report; surveys of customers, employees, and interest groups; workshops in the specialist units; dialogs with individual stakeholder groups; and events such as the “Daimler Sustainability Dialogue.” We also conduct symposia in order to gather input from our stakeholders, and we take into account the analyses of our News and Issues Management team and our Society and Technology Research Group. In this way, we identify fields of action that influence our company and that we can, in turn, influence ourselves.

Stakeholder surveys
To enable a priority ranking of the identified fields of action, we conduct an international open stakeholder survey every two years. The target groups are not preselected in advance. For more than one month, all interested parties can take part in the survey on our Website at www.daimler.com, and name and evaluate topics that are important to them. In our assessment of the results, we give special consideration to great significance of our primary stakeholder groups (shareholders and investors, customers, suppliers, and employees) as well as to non-governmental organizations. We had received more than 700 replies by the end of the last survey in the summer of 2015. The next survey will be held in 2017.

Determining materiality
With the help of a materiality analysis, we compare the results of the online survey — which in the year under review was supplemented with about 60 interviews with sustainability experts from Germany and abroad — with those of an internal survey of the members of our company’s sustainability bodies and of the entire Board of Managementof Daimler. These internal bodies discuss which topics have material effects on our company from a social, ecological, ethical, human-rights, and economic perspective.

Consistent action
The materiality analysis shows us the areas to which we have to pay particular attention. As a result, we further intensified our sustainability management activities in 2016, focusing particularly on the key topics of the materiality analysis, which we also took into account when selecting topics for our annual “Daimler Sustainability Dialogue.” In the year under review, we began to orient our sustainability strategy even more strongly toward clearly defined focus themes based on the main future-oriented topics of the materiality analysis. We will systematically continue this process in the year ahead. The PDF below depicts the fields of action that were evaluated in our last assessment in 2015. The fields are clustered by topic and arranged in descending order according to stakeholder priorities.

Click here to download the 2016 Materiality Analysis Report 

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