Society

Our operations affect a broad range of stakeholders. We believe that maintaining strong and open relationships with our employees, customers, suppliers, dealers, investors and society at large plays an important role in our ability to meet our goals.

Positive relationships with employees and business partners help us to improve efficiencies, cost and quality, and to develop and deliver new innovations. Effective two-way communication with our customers, dealers and other stakeholders helps us to understand and deliver the products that customers want. Strong relationships with our suppliers enable us to work together to implement the environmental and human rights initiatives that are critical to a sustainable business.

Assessing Materiality

Our recently updated materiality analysis confirms that our relationships with stakeholders remain an important issue for both the Company and our stakeholders. Specifically, the analysis identified the issues of employee relationships, supplier relationships, dealer relationships, and diversity and inclusion as highly or moderately important. Supplier relationships, in fact, increased in importance from our last analysis and are now considered among Ford’s top material issues.

In addition, workplace health and safety continued to remain an issue of high potential impact on Ford and of moderate concern to stakeholders. We also found the issues of community engagement, impacts and contributions to be of high concern to Ford and of moderate concern to stakeholders – a reversal from our last materiality analysis, which found these issues to be of higher concern to stakeholders than to our Company itself. All of these types of issues are addressed in this section.

The materiality analysis showed customers to be most concerned with issues related to the competitiveness of our products, including fuel economy, quality, safety, emerging markets products and strategies, and tailpipe emissions. They were also concerned about clean vehicle and fuel technologies, as well as issues of community engagement. These issues are addressed in the Climate Change, Environment and Economy sections of this report.