The question of how to build and sustain trust—amongst clients, stakeholders, customers, team members — is an extremely important one in our industry given the level of collaboration required on a daily basis.  But there are some practical things we can do to build a solid foundation on the road to trusted partnerships.

The case for stakeholder transparency

The immediacy of digital communication, expectations of the public and sheer volume of team members involved in a program of work makes managing stakeholder engagement more important than ever.

As the saying goes ‘the best way to find out if you can trust someone, is to trust them’.  Taking the step towards opening up information channels to key roles and stakeholders can have huge benefits.  

Trust building takes time, however is helped exponentially by being transparent in information.  We have found that providing shared visibility over project and program data, KPI metrics and information builds trust in itself - providing value in an open and transparent forum.

We know that trust isn't built overnight, but the foundation of trust can be

As companies embrace strategies that make transparency, timeliness, and accountability core operating principles, they are constantly seeking to find more efficient methods and platforms to do so.  Doing this well results in freeing up teams to be more effective.

For organisations and stakeholder management this can be a brave step, especially where sharing data, insights and context is concerned.  

At Mooven, we believe collaboration is critical and will continue to invest heavily in functionality to support collaboration.  Our new saved views make collaboration easier as you can tailor the content to the audience - and quickly.

Sharing information to respond quickly to public pressure

Digital and social media amplifies the voice of the public, and our understanding of facts and truth is far more contested and diffused.  Arming teams and stakeholders with easy access to transparent information, can speed up the feedback loop and positively impact public perception.  When media or community groups scrutinise projects, the fact that information is available and open to all is important and it means everyone can respond.

The end result?  Responding in a timely way but also with evidenced based information as to the real impact your project is (or isn't at all) having on the public.

Check out how Mooven allows you to control which routes and information your share with others, giving them the ability to receive alerts on aspects such as traffic impact delay, queue length, speed through site, noise, rainfall, dust or incidents and other unplanned events via annotations.

But all this communication is time consuming!

Driving transparency and collaboration within projects or programs of work can be time consuming - but a vital ingredient to building trusted partnerships.  

Not everyone needs to see the same information, for example, information needs differ from a comms manager to project engineer.  It’s an area where we can aim to get more efficient with our stakeholders - implementing ways to have the right information accessible at the right time to the right team.

Our approach has been to support program and project leads by leveraging Mooven. How? by creating specific customised views to share with different teams, as well as partners, stakeholders and clients allowing everyone to see what’s relevant and critical to them/their roles.

This was based on some common themes we heard from our customers:

• “I want to share a weekly view of community experience with my comms team, and for the comms manager they need a 24hr view of this”

• “What does live traffic look like at the northern end of our worksite only for our traffic manager?”

• “I want to share only one route with my specific client so they can monitor queues on only one part of our network operations”

• “The senior exec team want a monthly view of the project so we can report easily to them on high level outcomes promised

Our customers were excited about creating the tailored project views listed above and many more that allowed their stakeholders to get the specific insights they need to make decisions - and quickly. 

Five stakeholder approaches that drive positive outcomes

We are not experts… its’ a learning journey for ourselves in building winning stakeholders relationships.  However there are some tips along the way that we have received and help us in engaging stakeholders:

1. Have an engagement strategy (could be as informal as an initial coffee to gain agreement) that sets a goal for what you are achieving together - align early.
   
   

2. Review past engagements you had with this team or stakeholder - what worked well? Identify opportunities from previous feedback.  
   
   

3. Map your stakeholders - define criteria for identifying and prioritising stakeholders - what info do they need and who?
   
   

4. Set the rules of engagement - logistics, regularity of comms and the best channels to communicate by are important to clarify early, especially in a time where you can chat to stakeholders on multiple channels and create mixed messaging loops.
   
   

5. Ensure transparency of information and allow for stakeholder contributions - having open access to information goes a long way to mitigating stakeholder tension and helps you to iterate together whilst remaining focused on priorities.

Building trust with stakeholders is a journey.  We know that trust isn't built overnight, but the foundation of trust can be.