SUSTAINABILITY POLICY
The link below contains STAG Industrial’s Sustainability Policy.
COMMITMENT
We are committed to having a robust corporate responsibility program that incorporates environmental, social and governance (ESG) strategies into our business to increase both the sustainability and the value of our portfolio.
Our management team recognized the benefits that come from dialogue with our stockholders, our employees and our tenants. We thoughtfully consider all stakeholder feedback. Investor feedback led to modifications in our ESG practices, executive compensation program and public disclosures. Our employee survey results helped us better understand morale, satisfaction and engagement and have informed our strategies for improving company culture and communicating with our employees.
To help our stakeholders understand our ESG efforts, we respond to the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB) public disclosure survey and are working on collaborating with our tenants and technology vendors to develop monitoring capabilities to ensure we are improving our overall sustainability performance across our portfolio.
As the long-term owner of industrial buildings, we have a vested interest in making investments and working with our tenants to create a portfolio of industrial buildings with modern sustainable features that will continue to meet tenant demand and help our tenants run their operations as efficiently as possible.
We are committed to good corporate citizenship. This commitment to social responsibility extends to all, including employees, customers (tenants), communities, investors, suppliers and visitors. Our mission is to extend our financial resources, time and core values and principles to improve communities. Our work with local non-profit organizations supporting children and young adults is described in greater detail elsewhere on this site.
MANAGEMENT OF OUR SUSTAINABILITY PRACTICES
We have a Corporate Responsibility Committee consisting of our General Counsel, our Senior Vice President — Construction Management and our Senior Vice President — Investor Relations, which administers our environmental stewardship efforts. In addition, our Senior Vice President — Construction Management manages a team of employees directly responsible identifying, implementing and monitoring sustainable initiatives across our portfolio. A separate committee of employees, our Charitable Action Committee, coordinates our community outreach work.
EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
We have conducted several internal and external surveys of our employees to measure our company’s culture and our employees’ engagement. We chose to conduct these surveys to collect our employee’s feedback based on the recognition that they more than any other stakeholder best understand our culture.
On an annual basis since 2016, we have participated in an employee engagement survey administered by a third party that provides employees an opportunity to share their perspectives on what is and is not working within our organization. In 2019, we are scheduled to participate in a second third-party survey of our employees designed to identify opportunities for improving employee engagement and business success. The results of the survey will include benchmarking scores against comparably-sized businesses.
In 2018, we conducted an internally-developed survey of our employees centered on culture (as opposed to engagement). We created the survey based on professional frameworks to assess and explore how our employees view our culture by archetype and to gain insight on what makes certain employees successful in our culture.
TENANT ENGAGEMENT
Each year, STAG conducts a tenant survey to provide an opportunity for tenants to provide feedback that they did not communicate during our physical visits each year. This survey allows tenants to provide feedback on their location. STAG also uses the survey as an opportunity to remind tenants that STAG is willing to finance capital improvements that lead to energy savings. STAG has a program where we invest our capital into the building and the tenant pays for the project with monthly payments that are less than or equal to the monthly savings realized through execution of the project. This allows for a more efficient building at similar or reduced monthly operational cost.
STOCKHOLDER ENGAGEMENT
We collaborate with our investors, our employees and our tenants to understand their expectations and interests in ESG and other matters.
We provide institutional investors with many opportunities and events to provide feedback directly to our management team throughout the year, including formal events, one-on-one sessions and group meetings throughout the year. Our management team attends investor conferences, non-deal roadshows and numerous individual investor meetings. These meetings cover a range of topics, including our financial condition and results of operations, our business investment, finance and operation strategies, our stock price performance, economic, industry and market trends, corporate governance and executive compensation and other matters.
In addition to, and apart from, our regular investor meetings, we speak exclusively about executive compensation and corporate governance with a number of our investors.
We engage with stockholders throughout the year in order to:
- provide visibility and transparency into our business, performance and corporate practices;
- hear from our stockholders about issues that are important to them and their expectations for our company; and
- assess emerging issues that may affect our business, inform our decision making, enhance our public disclosures and help shape our practices.