Prysmian assesses stakeholder priorities through two approaches. Firstly, it works with internal sources to set sustainability goals and priorities by holding meetings across corporate functions, benchmarking competitors and gathering information for its Sustainability Report based on GRI standards and publications.
Prysmian also engages with external stakeholders including customers, suppliers and investors to get their direct feedback. In 2019, we listened to our stakeholder through a survey and with multi-stakeholder event.
The event, which is held annually, involves customers, suppliers, local communities, universities and research centres, NGOs, public administrations and environmental representatives in workshops and open discussions on topics related to sustainability and corporate social responsibility. This interaction is increasingly integral to growth strategy because discussions feed into Prysmian’s sustainability efforts.
Participants make a significant contribution to identifying the main impacts of Prysmian’s actions on various stages of the value chain, and make suggestions on how to improve. Senior management is directly involved through special interviews related to sustainability reporting. This feedback is used by Prysmian to create a materiality matrix that helps set sustainability goals and priorities.
Prysmian updated its Materiality Matrix in 2019 after the first full year of General Cable's acquisition to make the Matrix leaner and more focused on issues that are important to the Group and its stakeholders. The process resulted in the selection of six significant issues: Environment, Human Rights, Ethics & Integrity, Health & Safety, Customer Centricity, and Employees.
These issues were subsequently evaluated by executives managers and assigned with an order of priority (from 0 to 5) within the Materiality Matrix. Three overarching topics were then selected that reflect priorities for both stakeholders and the Group, and are incorporated into the Sustainability Scorecard: occupational health & safety, ethics & integrity, solutions for sustainable applications.
The Group intends to strengthen the systems for managing occupational health and safety, in order to reduce the number of injuries and occupational diseases and, via suitable training programmes, develop a culture of prevention and management covering these two aspects.
This topic includes the Group’s commitment to a business management model based on the most stringent standards of business ethics and integrity, especially with regard to the measures adopted to prevent both active and passive corruption.
This topic includes the Group’s commitment to develop solutions that may generate sustainability benefits (e.g. solutions for plants that generate renewable energy, smart grids, innovative solutions for the electrical system).
