Through dialogue, we can:

• Identify our stakeholders and their expectations, and thus gain an in-depth understanding of the challenges concerning our mutual relationships and the impact of our operations.
• Highlight priority projects in our mutual interest and contribute to their implementation by appropriate partners.
• Jointly define the projects, along with the roles and responsibilities of the various parties involved.

Developing Appropriate Tools

Dialogue, though essential, can sometimes be difficult to establish, due to the diversity of the cultural and operational contexts we encounter. This is why we have been developing tools in recent years that will help us make our approach more professional and therefore more effective. We have prepared several in-house guides, including the Local Community Guide, the Stakeholder Dialogue Guide and the Developing Local Content Guide¹.

1. “Local content" refers to the set of actions — local recruitment, training, purchases of local goods and services — that are designed to develop the industrial infrastructure and skills of the people in the countries that host oil and gas projects.

We have also deployed an internal tool, SRM+ (Stakeholder Relationship Management), to enhance the professionalism of our community development initiatives. With SRM+, site and subsidiary managers can develop a detailed map of societal issues, based primarily on dialogue with stakeholders.

The system then draws on an up-to-date list of best practices to guide the definition of a joint actions plan, optimizing the benefits for all parties. It also describes how the plan should be implemented and tracked.  Today, around 100 Total sites have mapped their stakeholders using SRM+.