Hug your shareholders

I often wonder how much notice listed companies take of their shareholders. Apart from the occasional skirmish at the AGM and awkward phone call now and then from those shareholders more advanced in years who ‘just don’t get it’ and have too much time on their hands, do you ever solicit comment from them, or are they a necessary evil to be avoided at every opportunity?

Every time I ask a company the question “Do you know what your shareholders are looking for in an annual report?”, I inevitably receive a shrug of the shoulders in reply, accompanied by a vacant stare. “If we don’t hear from them then everything must be OK”. Come on guys, you can do better than this. Show them a bit of respect and interest. You may just learn something. It may just be valuable. It may just save you money. It may just help save the planet. It may get you more sleep at night.

I know some companies do actually send out the occasional survey and request for feedback, but I suspect they’re very few. And you never get to hear what they did with the results. Strange that.

As a result of the change in reporting Legislation in late 2007 here in Australia, share registries have asked shareholders this year if they are happy to receive their annual report online, or if not, they can request a printed one, mailed at great expense and inconvenience to the company and the planet.

For many companies this change in Legislation was one of the biggest challenges they have ever faced. Do you consider then that it may be beneficial to ask shareholders if they’re happy with the online information delivery? – particularly if you tried to engage them with one of those new fangled HTML mini-website things. You defaulted again to a PDF of the printed report! How could you? Have you no shame? They’re so ’90s.

Beyond the choice of delivery… have you considered the report content and whether it is actually covering ground that shareholders really want you to cover? Why not? Consider this. Have you been blindly following the same old tired format year in and year out? Have you been wasting lots of your time all these years? Do these agonising thoughts keep you awake into the small hours?

You know the writing is on the wall don’t you? You’re going to have to shift to one of those mini-website HTML online reports. Those that are fast to access and easy on the navigation. Those that look pretty schmicko and can even have video of the Chairman and CEO included (providing they get a haircut and a weekend crash course at NIDA). And when you do shift it makes sense you rejig the content into screen size chunks that make for easy reading. I guess you may as well go the whole hog and reconsider the entire report and do it properly! My number in Australia is 02 8256 3999. We’ll start by asking your shareholders what they want and then we’ll create something new, different and devastating – something your shareholders will love you for. They may even want to hug you.

Tony Heywood is a Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia, founder of Heywood Innovation in Sydney Australia and joint founder of BrandSynergy in Singapore.

View some of Heywood’s work on www.heywood.com.au

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