Saturday, January 12, 2019

How To Improve Shareholder Communications

By Linda Russell


In big companies, there will be a number of shareholders that come from different backgrounds and do not really know anything about each other. With that said, there would be times when factions and distrust could brew up. The only way for the corporate secretary and the management team would be to improve on shareholder communications to help fix all the tension.

In order to have better and more transparent communication between shareholders and investors, the first thing that one has to do is make sure that the board of directors know all the investors. Usually, it would be the board of directors and the investors that would have tension because of disagreements in company policy. So the first thing for the corporate secretary to do is identify the shareholders and determine what their goals and vision are for the company.

After identifying all of the shareholders, the next thing to do is to identify all the ones that have the voting power. Take note that there will be investors who are only pumping in money to make capital gains and dividend gains. These ones are the ones who do not have any interest in crafting company policies so one does not need to gather them when unifying the shareholders for a company policy meeting.

Now, one thing to do is to make sure that all of the investors are all in the same page, which is to make sure that the company grows. With that, each shareholder meeting must have an agenda wherein all of them will have to give their own outputs on how to solve certain problems. The corporate secretary must just make sure that the vision is all the same.

Of course, not all of the concerns need to be noted because only a handful of specific problems need to be solved. After all, shareholder meetings are usually made in order to change big company policies that would really affect the business. That is why it is the job of the corporate secretary to set up agendas for the meetings so that only relevant problems will be addressed.

With all that in mind, one should now set the agenda for the shareholder meeting. The corporate secretary has to be as specific as possible with company agendas otherwise the discussion can deviate to another topic without anyone knowing. From there, the facilitator will have to listen to all of the concerns of each shareholder regarding each concern in the agenda to get an objective view.

Sometimes though, one may not be able to control the shareholders on his or her own. With that, one can seek the help of a proxy advisor. What the proxy advisor will do is he or she will analyze the shareholders based on their individual profiles and also analyze voting so that one will know what moves to make regarding communications among shareholders.

For those who are in charge of facilitating and keeping the shareholders in the room, then make sure to follow some of these tips. Especially for large corporations, controlling the number of shareholders is going to be very difficult. For this reason, one has to know exactly how to do it otherwise things will definitely spiral out of control.




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