Victoria Usher, Founder and CEO, GingerMay.
Environmental and social responsibility is shaping how clients and partners perceive the companies they work with. Almost eight in ten business leaders say sustainability is a priority in their supply chain. As a result, they will become increasingly more selective about the partners they choose to do business with.
A company sharing its clients’ values and supporting their commitments is becoming a competitive differentiator, making sustainable credentials such as the B Corp™ Certification increasingly important in the business landscape.
So, why is this certification meaningful and how can leaders set out to achieve it?
Introducing the B Corp journey
Becoming a B Corp verifies that a company meets the highest standards for social and environmental responsibility, most notably via a legal commitment to balance profit and purpose.
Attaining B Corp Certification requires a company to undergo an impact assessment that evaluates how its business model benefits key stakeholder groups, including internal teams, clients, communities and the environment. What’s more, it must undergo the assessment process every three years. Combined with the requirement to publicly and regularly disclose performance, this encourages continuous progress and safeguards against the misrepresentation of sustainable initiatives’ impact.
B Corp Certification ensures accountability and transparent, data-based verification of a company’s sustainability. Achieving Certified B Corp status is a significant undertaking for a business, but there are actionable steps that leaders can take to start their journey.
1. Put sustainability practices in writing.
Leaders can begin by assessing the sustainable practices their business already has in place. Examples of these could include using local businesses to supply office catering, ongoing support for charitable organizations or approaching neurodiversity within recruitment and career development.
Formalizing such practices within company documents is a critical first step to approaching B Corp Certification, as the application process assesses an organisation’s written policies. Additionally, this helps a business communicate its policies to internal teams and enables it to take stock of current initiatives. In turn, this then informs how it can progress its sustainability and B Corp journey.
2. Use data to demonstrate performance.
After assessing the actions their business is taking to be more sustainable, leaders must set ways of measuring how these perform. As part of the application process, a business will need to share data points on five key areas, including governance, workers, customers, communities and the environment.
In a data-driven landscape where everything is measurable, it is important to identify the most relevant metrics. To build on the previous examples, a business can track what percentage of office catering comes from local business, record how much it contributes to charity and monitor staff satisfaction and sentiment towards inclusive practices. These data points underscore the impact of a business’s policies and deepen leaders’ understanding of what more they can do.
3. Decide where to make a meaningful difference.
There are many paths a business can take to improve its environmental and social impact. Becoming B Corp Certified doesn’t require solving every challenge at once; rather, it is about joining a global community of organizations that can deliver meaningful change and use business as a force for good.
For instance, environmental actions could include supporting biodiversity or improving waste management. Community actions, meanwhile, could include addressing food poverty or creating more opportunities for underrepresented talent to enter the industry. Business leaders should select which changes they are most capable of driving to guarantee they make a demonstrable difference.
4. Give the team a voice in the decisions.
B Corps recognise their workers as a stakeholder group, so including them within decision making is critical. This model is referred to as stakeholder governance, which accounts for the interests of all stakeholders, including internal teams, and prioritizes social and environmental impact alongside profit.
In light of this, teams need to have a say in their business’s sustainable targets and its approach to achieving them. This helps an organisation identify the issues that matter to its staff, plus boost engagement and support for its sustainable practices.
5. Don’t approach the application as a tick-box exercise.
When a business achieves B Corp Certification, it enters a framework for ongoing progress. Adopting this progressive mindset at the application stage means leaders can use the impact assessment as a chance to look deeper into their processes and improve how their business operates.
Approaching the application as a tick-box exercise, on the other hand, will put businesses at a disadvantage. To maintain certification, companies must regularly prove they continue to meet high standards for social and environmental performance. Since these standards are evolving, leaders must proactively seek opportunities and learnings that can enhance their initiatives.
Certifications such as B Corp will enable companies to both refine their approach to sustainability and differentiate themselves from competitors. Sustainability credentials will likely become to businesses what the ISO 9001 is to quality management, so demonstrating genuine commitment to sustainability now will place companies ahead of the curve.
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