ESG success factors for shareholders' meetings

With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies have had to make a rapid transition from face-to-face to virtual collaboration. This shift has extended to shareholders’ meetings, creating new challenges, such as ensuring secure and compliant voting processes and facilitating meaningful shareholder engagement. However, virtual shareholders’ meetings also offer significant opportunities, such as enabling participation from any location, reducing event costs, and lowering travel-related greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, companies now face a complex decision: whether to hold physical, virtual, or even hybrid shareholders’ meetings in the post-COVID era. The ESG approach provides a valuable framework for assessing the pros and cons of physical, virtual, and hybrid meeting formats across environmental, social, and governance dimensions. In a recent short study, we identified key ESG success factors for shareholders’ meetings and compared the different meeting formats based on a brief literature review and expert discussions.