Supporting Effective Investment Stewardship Part Two: Unifying Engagement Technology and Programs

This article is the second in a three-part series on Supporting Effective Investment Stewardship. The series explores how Glass Lewis helps investors strengthen their stewardship programs. In the first article, we focused on how investors can align engagement activity with voting priorities. In Part Two, we explore how investors can maintain, scale, and document engagements and progress over time, aligned with their stewardship priorities.

Engagement with portfolio companies is a core element of investor stewardship, driven by regulatory requirements, voluntary codes, and rising client expectations. Once engagement priorities are established, many investors turn their attention to how activity is monitored and communicated over time – particularly as programs expand in scope and visibility.

Evolving Expectations for Engagement Oversight

Stewardship frameworks such as the UN PRI and the UK Stewardship Code emphasize the need for transparent, outcome-oriented engagement. Asset owners and regulators increasingly expect investors to show not only activities undertaken, but how they connect to objectives, escalation steps, and measurable progress.

At the same time, stewardship responsibilities are expanding beyond stewardship teams, across ESG, investment, and client‑facing functions – creating a growing need for consistent data capture, shared workflows, and reliable audit trails. Many firms also face increasing scrutiny of reporting quality, including the accuracy and completeness of engagement records.

These pressures highlight the limitations of tools such as spreadsheets, which are not suited for multi-year initiatives, cross-team collaboration, or consistent data capture. As stewardship programs expand, purpose-built systems are essential to support structured monitoring and credible stewardship reporting.

The Operational Challenge: Tracking Engagement at Scale

Engagement practices vary across investors, but certain elements are consistently important: accurate data capture, centralized record-keeping, clear timelines, and easy data extraction for reporting.

Today, many investors still rely on generic desktop applications and spreadsheets. While effective at a smaller scale, these tools become increasingly difficult to manage as engagement volume rises and team coordination grows more complex. Such applications also tend to create data silos that limit oversight, consistency, and collaboration.

Technology to Support Scalable Stewardship

Glass Lewis’ Engagement Management Platform (EMP) supports investors in recording, monitoring, and reporting on stewardship activity across the entire engagement cycle. By centralizing stewardship data, optimizing workflows, and simplifying reporting, it can help investors increase the overall productivity of both the stewardship and investment teams.

Key capabilities include:

• Customizable platform: Configure data fields and templates to reflect internal engagement methodologies and external reporting frameworks.
• Multi-level tracking: Record activity at the portfolio, company, initiative, objective, milestone, activity, and voting levels, enabling comprehensive oversight across engagement cycles.
• Cross-team collaboration: Alleviate data silos and facilitate coordination across teams through unified access to shared engagement records.
• Efficient reporting tools: Filter and export structured data to support internal reviews, stewardship reporting, PRI submissions, and client disclosures.

By linking engagement objectives, activities, and outcomes in a structured system, investors can more easily demonstrate progress, strengthen internal alignment, and make reporting more efficient and more credible. Watch an overview video.

Supporting Execution Through Engagement Services

In addition to technology, many investors use external engagement support to complement or extend their internal capabilities. External engagement support can be customized (covered in Part One of this series) or investors may choose to scale their engagement program by participating in outsourced engagements.  

For example, with Glass Lewis’ Active Stewardship Engagement program, a stewardship team conducts multi-year engagements with portfolio companies on behalf of investor clients. They identify issues at investee companies that may affect long-term shareholder value and undertake structured outreach to encourage improved disclosure and practices.

Glass Lewis’ engagement process includes:

1. Screening and priority setting: The stewardship team reviews ESG datasets, controversies, voting outcomes, and client holdings to identify suitable companies.
2. Initial outreach: The stewardship team informs companies of the issues identified for engagement.
3. Engagement meetings: Stewardship team members seek to schedule meetings with company representatives to discuss issues and expectations, and all engagement activity is recorded on the EMP.
4. Follow-ups: The stewardship team continues outreach on a bi-annual basis, until the issue is resolved or sufficient progress is demonstrated. Engagements can be downloaded as case studies to be used in stakeholder reporting (see example).

Conclusion

Effective stewardship requires clear objectives, progress monitoring, and consistent documentation to track results and investment implications. As expectations for transparency and measurable outcomes increase, many investors are reviewing how to scale the engagements effectively.

By combining purpose-built technology, global governance expertise, and structured engagement programs, Glass Lewis helps investors credibly scale and strengthen their stewardship practices, internal processes, and communication of results to stakeholders.

To learn more about how these solutions work in practice, please contact our team or explore our Stewardship Solutions.