Vodafone New Zealand has an impact on a wide range of stakeholders. Our products, services and operations have an effect on our employees, our customers, our shareholders and broad cross-section of the community. These stakeholders are at the heart of our business and to operate responsibly we must ensure we understand their expectations of our behaviour and the impacts we are having on them. We must also ensure we're effectively engaging all our stakeholders, including those who do not have a direct impact on our operations or those whose voices might otherwise not be heard. These stakeholders typically include organisations and individuals with an interest in the social and environmental impacts of our business.
We have many engagement channels for our stakeholders. We regularly survey customers and employees on their satisfaction with our performance and we have discussions with the Government on industry matters.
Our Corporate Responsibility stakeholder engagement strategy is designed to complement these activities and provide a platform to engage those stakeholders omitted in the traditional engagement channels. In previous years we hosted structured stakeholder engagement sessions, where we invited people and organisations from a broad cross-section to discuss our social and environmental performance. These sessions were useful in developing our broad understanding of the range of our material issues and impacts. However, we found that repeating these events on an annual basis did not yield the same insights and value to Vodafone or the attendees, as the issues were already well understood.
Our current approach favours issue-specific engagement to deepen our understanding of newly emerging issues, and strategic, solutions-focused, engagement on complex issues to understand our role in New Zealand's response to these issues.
Last year we hosted three New Zealand Future Agenda events. The Future Agenda is a global Vodafone programme which aims to provide an open forum for discussion on how to address the major challenges which society faces over the next 10 years.
The New Zealand sessions were attended by leading academics, politicians, business and community leaders. We hosted three events, in Wellington, Christchurch and Auckland to discuss global issues with particular relevance to New Zealand. These were immigration and connectivity (Wellington), water and energy (Christchurch) and transport (Auckland). The insights from these sessions, along with similar workshops hosted around the world, are available on the Future Agenda site.
Each year we conduct an online CR survey of our employees. Employees ranked a range of key issues on a 1-5 ascending scale in terms of importance and also how well they thought we were managing these issues. The employees said that our performance was weakest in managing public perception of health issues around mobile phone use and mobile phone sites. Our employees ranked us highest in our most visible programmes, TXT bullying, mobile recycling and mobiles and driving.
