Selecting Priorities

Stakeholder Relationships

How We Engage Our Stakeholders

Linde is committed to stakeholder engagement across governance, social, and environmental aspects. This commitment to stakeholder engagement is endorsed by executive leadership at Linde.

Identification of stakeholders: Linde has identified relevant stakeholder groups, including: its employees, customers, shareholders, suppliers, government agencies, industry associations and groups, and communities.  Linde describes the relevance of each of these groups and means of engagement in its annual Sustainability report.

• Employees: Linde is committed to the safety, well-being and professional development of all employees worldwide. The company is committed to providing a safe and inclusive workplace with an emphasis on the highest standards of integrity and professional performance. This allows Linde to maintain a high rate of employee engagement, which helps attract and retain talent.
• Customers: Customer satisfaction is crucial to Linde's results. A significant portion of Linde's revenue is earned from recurring customers and retained accounts. In addition to an analysis of customer retention, we assess the satisfaction level of a subset of our largest accounts.
• Shareholders: Linde has a strong shareholder focus. Meetings held with investors and broader ESG groups confirmed Linde's ongoing commitment to sustainability. We emphasized that priorities were to retain our respective strong programs, to develop our sustainability and climate change targets and to integrate sustainability globally across Linde.
• Suppliers: Linde infuses its core values through supply chain engagement initiatives structured to cultivate supplier capacity. This drives better business performance, sustains higher quality and improves eco-proficiency and product development, including access to innovation. We optimize initiatives locally and across the globe by focusing on select commodities and distinct groups of suppliers.
• Government Agencies: Linde has a strong global ethics and compliance program. Linde's Government Relations department participates in discussions with international, national and sub-national governmental bodies regarding legislation that impacts our business, drives energy efficiency, delivers positive outcomes in electricity regulation and supports our unique technologies to produce clean energy. 
• Industry Association and Groups: Linde is a member of a range of trade associations, business associations and alliances, including national chemical associations and industrial gas associations in the company’s key geographies, and manufacturers associations and chambers of commerce, through which it engages in dialogue with government officials and stakeholders about issues that are important to the company and its business.
• Communities: Community is a Linde value. Linde is, at its core, a "local" company. We make long-term investments in communities where we build facilities and source locally for talent, leadership and suppliers. This, in turn, helps strengthen Linde’s reputation and business relationships.

Community Stakeholder Engagement

With a presence in more than 80 countries, Linde is, at its core, a "local" company. As the company is a member of numerous individual local neighborhoods, communities are one of its relevant stakeholders. For the process for determining Linde stakeholders and engaging those stakeholder groups, see the Engaging Stakeholders section. Linde integrates their feedback into its process to determine priorities, key performance indicators, and the company’s targets.

Community relations begin with the initial entry into a new area, and the company continues to be part of the neighborhoods where its facilities have a presence and where its team members live and work. Being a good neighbor includes not only understanding community needs to set up or volunteer in suitable community engagement activities, but also to communicate crucial information, and to listen to and consider opinions, questions and concerns.

Programs like Linde's Skills Pipeline Workforce Development Program are an essential part of strategic community engagement at Linde. These programs continue to be marketed broadly across the community at large, which helps to reduce the risk that underserved communities lack awareness of opportunities. Since many opportunities may be associated with emerging or rapidly advancing technology, a lack of awareness can lead, potentially, to reduced likelihood of vulnerable communities to participate in and adopt new technologies that can be one source of new opportunities and self-sufficiency.

In its Responsible Care Global Policy, the company defines general guiding principles regarding communications with external stakeholders, such as communities, and procedures to periodically assess their questions and concerns, implement suitable communication processes and measure performance. The policy also provides the responsibilities for business heads and operations heads, accordingly. Linde communicates information about product hazards and safe handling, and safety, health and environmental programs and performance, as appropriate. This also includes sharing emergency preparedness plans with community representatives. The effectiveness of the company's stakeholder communications programs is evaluated regularly. As for all other stakeholders, the company’s standard of responsible behavior towards communities is confirmed by Linde's CBI.

Formal ways to contact Linde are available on its website, for both email and phone inquiries.  To report suspected complaints and concerns, or to anonymously report violations, several channels are provided to employees, including the Integrity Hotline. The company also encourages customers, vendors or other observers to use the hotline to submit complaints or allegations about these or other matters. The company provides an annual report of Linde incidences of substantiated hotline reports on its website at: https://www.linde.com/sustainability/reporting-center/hotline-reports.