Local residents are the stakeholder group closest to the physical consequences of your business operations and furthest from your decision-making. They smell, hear and see what happens, but rarely receive an explanation that goes beyond a permit application or a newsletter. That difference in proximity and information is exactly what the Trust Baseline looks at.
Within most organisations there is a picture of how the surrounding community views the company. That picture is often based on complaint records, a single consultation moment, or the impression an environmental manager brings back from an information evening. It is a real picture, but it is also a filtered picture: built from the moments when local residents came forward, not from the silence of those who did not.
The internal survey of the Trust Baseline records this picture as it currently lives within the organisation. Not as a correction, but as a starting point. What management thinks local residents consider important. Where management believes the biggest concern lies: noise, traffic, odour, decline in property values, long-term health. And which commitments have been made in recent years, big or small.
Alongside this is a survey among local residents themselves. It does not ask whether they are satisfied, but what they would like to know and from whom. Questions such as: do you feel that agreements made are being kept, do you know who to contact if something changes, and has there been a moment when communication did not match what you saw or heard.
It is a survey that does not pass judgement on the organisation, but records how the relationship is experienced at this moment. We do not know what local residents think until they say so themselves. The instrument creates room for that, without filling that room with an assumption.
The core of the Trust Baseline lies not in either survey separately, but in the difference between them. An organisation that believes noise nuisance is the biggest concern, while local residents mainly cite uncertainty about future expansion, sees something there that neither measurement shows on its own. That difference is neither right nor wrong. It is a signal about where attention currently lies and where it might need to lie.
With local residents, this difference is often greater than with other groups, because contact is less structural than with employees or customers. A local resident has no contract, no supply relationship, no escalation process. What exists is physical proximity and a history of commitments kept or not kept.
With local residents this pattern holds more strongly than with almost any other stakeholder group: a promised noise measurement that is never reported back, or an information board that was promised and never installed, weighs more heavily in memory than a large investment in filtration installations made without any announcement. The large investment is appreciated when it is noticed. The small commitment is remembered when it is broken, precisely because it was so small and so concrete.
This is why the Trust Baseline includes a commitment tracker alongside the measurement itself. Commitments to local residents are often made informally: at a residents' evening, in a phone call, in a letter that never made it into the archive of corporate affairs but did end up in a local resident's drawer. A tracker that records these commitments and follows their fulfilment does not prevent something from going wrong, but it does prevent an organisation from forgetting a commitment that the surrounding community has not forgotten.
The relationship with local residents changes with the seasons, with construction phases, with incidents elsewhere in the sector that affect trust in the entire industry. A one-off measurement records a state, but says little about direction. The signal rhythm of the Trust Baseline repeats the survey at fixed moments, so that a shift becomes visible before it results in a signature campaign or a letter to the municipal council.
This rhythm also aligns with how other parties view the surrounding community. A municipality or province renewing a permit also looks at the relationship with the immediate surroundings. A regulator assessing a file does not do so separately from the picture that local residents present either. This makes the Trust Baseline not an instrument for local residents alone, but a building block that also carries through into the conversation with regulators and with advocacy organisations that speak partly on behalf of local residents.
The Trust Baseline for local residents is under development. There is no dashboard yet, no fixed questionnaire that can be deployed tomorrow, no tracker set up. What does exist is a clear picture of what needs to be measured and why: the difference between internal perception and external signal, and the trail of commitments that follows from it. Anyone already interested in this can sign up for the waiting list. Nothing is being offered that does not yet exist, and nothing is promised about when it will be ready.
The relationship with local residents is often maintained by people who also carry ten other files: permits, incident reports, reporting to management. Anyone who wants to know how much of that work can be supported with AI, and how much requires the personal contact that no system can take over, will find the work scan of FTE TO AI useful, which calculates per task which part qualifies for takeover.
Vraag maar. Het interessantste antwoord komt meestal van wie u nog niet heeft gesproken.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.