When we received our B Corp Certification last year, I was overjoyed, proud, relieved and a little bit daunted. We had become part of this great community but I was immediately aware that there was so much work we could be doing even better.
For those not familiar with B Impact Scores, your certification is based on achieving a minimum score level of 80 out of 200, it doesn’t sound very much but considering 50.9 is the median score for ordinary businesses, you see how much opportunity there is to have a greater impact than an ordinary business.
We qualified with a score of 90.3 which is a very respectable score for initial certification but look at that gap, I’m trained to see how much we could be doing better!
The score is made up of 5 areas: Governance, Workers, Community, Environment and Customers. We have been recognised as the Best for the World in Governance for our business size so we knew that we would be best to focus our future goals on the other areas but always a fan of improvement, we didn’t want to get too comfy in that area…
I want to share with you what our goals were for our first year as a B Corporation, what we’ve achieved and what we’ve still got to do to be the best business we can be.
Governance Goals (Evaluates a company’s overall mission, engagement around its social and environmental impact, ethics, and transparency)
- Set public targets and share progress to those targets (IN PROGRESS)
This was simply an oversight on our behalf, we set our targets internally, and they are a big part of our Trello board! But we forgot to share them externally! Now we move into year 2, we will share these with you all – keep an eye on our website!
Worker Goals (Evaluates a company’s contributions to its employees’ financial security, health & safety, wellness, career development, and engagement & satisfaction)
- Include a prohibition of child labour and forced or compulsory labour statement (DONE)
- Provide supplementary health and dental insurance (DONE)
- Provide a private pension or plan that specifically includes socially-responsible investing options (IN PROGRESS)
The financial situation of the last 12 months has been a bit of a rollercoaster and we have not yet been in a financial position where we can offer additional pension support, above the Government contributions. Whenever we set financial goals, we always want to go above and beyond and frankly that hasn’t happened this year. It’s been tough financially as other small business owners will know and to help our teams, we prioritised giving pay rises to support them on the day-to-day living costs increasing so dramatically. Sometimes long-term support has to be paused to help with immediate needs.
Community Goals (Community evaluates a company’s engagement with and impact on the communities in which it operates, hires from, and sources from)
- We have hosted or organised company service days in the last year (DONE)
- We have a policy to give preferences to suppliers with ownership from underrepresented populations (IN PROGRESS)
We have a very small number of suppliers and we haven’t found much need this year to extend our supplier base but yes, we could have written the policy regardless, an easy one for us to prioritise going forward but we tend to align ourselves to goals that mean action rather than writing policies for the sake of it.
Environment Goals (Environment evaluates a company’s overall environmental management practices as well as its impact on the air, climate, water, land, and biodiversity)
- Employees are provided with a list of environmentally-preferred vendors for office supplies (DONE)
- We monitor usage and have set absolute reduction targets regardless of company growth (IN PROGRESS)
We have been tracking and off-setting our carbon footprint, what we have found challenging this year in terms of setting targets is when we originally looked at our targets, we were still operating very much remotely. As so much more of our work is now face to face, travel has naturally increased and whilst we have managed to maintain similar levels of carbon footprint, it has been challenging to reduce. It’s a challenge but not impossible so one we need to focus more on.
Customers Goals (Customers evaluate a company’s stewardship of its customers through the quality of its products and services, ethical marketing, data privacy and security, and feedback channels)
- We have formally defined the outcomes sought by our product or service and have developed a theory of change for them (IN PROGRESS)
This has been a tricky one for us, we attended a great training course around how to develop a theory of change and have realised we are slightly outside of our skill strengths with this and probably need to bring in external expertise. We see it as really important to understand this area fully though so we are going to hone in on this on one of our learning days (each team member has a regular learning day where they can spend the day out of meetings, off emails, simply learning something new)
We haven’t completed all the goals we set out to achieve in our first year but we have made some pretty solid progress. As our company grows, we are trying to balance the day-to-day responsibilities of our clients and our other stakeholders and it can be a challenge.
Being part of this community has been a great honour for us and a great momentum to keep pushing harder for better business by constantly improving.
Year 2 of certification has got some big plans, watch this space!
