Engaging with companies

Company meeting at our London office.

The size of our investments gives us access to board members, senior management and specialists at companies. Our dialogue with them helps us understand how the companies are run and how they address sustainability-related risks and opportunities. We discuss topics such as financial performance, market developments, board responsibilities, equitable treatment of shareholders and sustainability. We also encourage better corporate reporting.

As a shareholder in more than 8,800 companies, we have to prioritise which companies we engage with. We focus on our largest investments, where we know the companies best. Meetings are conducted by members of our investment teams and our ownership department.

Companies often also approach us to discuss topics such as strategy, corporate governance and sustainability. They may also contact us ahead of their annual shareholder meeting to discuss executive pay or other matters shareholders will vote on.

When we want to discuss specific issues with companies, our dialogues take a targeted form where we follow up governance and strategy through:

• Strategic board dialogues where we meet the boards of the largest companies in the portfolio with the aim of enhancing our understanding of the company and improving our investment performance
• Net zero dialogues where we engage with the companies with the largest emissions and support them on their pathway to net zero
• Thematic dialogues where we raise specific sustainability issues with companies, prioritising topics that could affect their ability to create long-term value and following them up over a specific period of time
• Incident-based dialogues where we follow up unwanted incidents that could indicate weak corporate governance or poor management of environmental and social risks
• Ethical dialogues decided on by Norges Bank’s Executive Board following recommendations from the independent Council on Ethics

These dialogues come in addition to our management-level dialogues tomonitor corporate governance and discuss the companies’ handling of current governance issues. This is the largest category of our company meetings. In addition to meetings, we communicate with companies in writing. We distribute our expectation documents and position papers to companies to inform them of our priorities, and respond to enquiries from companies.

Read more about these dialogues in our responsible investment report

More on the reporting Download the report (pdf)

We also communicate in writing with the companies we invest in. We express our expectations and share our posisions on specific aspects of corporate governance. We also respond to questions from companies.