Becoming a B Corp is an amazing way to both improve your businesses overall sustainability and lets you publicize your achievements with the B Corp Certification.
B Corps are businesses that have voluntarily gone through a B Impact Assessment. Organised by B Labs the B Impact Assessment is a self assessment that looks at several key sustainability factors and grades your overall environmental and social impact, companies that score high enough qualify for the B Corp certification.
The B Corp certification is proof that a company is willing to go the extra mile and is doing it’s best to be a force for good in the world. It proves that your company is committed to making the world a better place. The UK is the world’s second largest B-Corp Community, with over 400 B Corps representing 22,000 employees, in the last year B Corp Applications doubled, making it the fastest growing B Corp community in the world.
The B Impact Assessment is a brilliant framework for sustainability reporting and sustainability practice, many companies discover ways to improve their climate and social impact during the assessment that they would have never considered previously. Even if you don’t decide to apply for certification it’s a valuable tool for assessing your own impacts and many businesses use it solely as a tool for that purpose.
The smaller you are as a business the easier it is to go through the B-Corp process. If becoming a B-Corp sounds like something your businesses should pursue then it’s worth doing it as early as possible, it’s harder to retroactively change things once they’ve scaled so the earlier in your businesses life-cycle you can go through the process the better.
The B Impact Assessment can be found here, there is no commitment to starting the assessment and it applies to any business of any size. Some best practices for going through the process include:
- Don’t expect to have all the information on hand immediately, there will be some parts of the assessment you will not have considered before.
- Bookmark sections you don’t have information on or don’t understand and come back to them later.
- Book a specific time every week (1-2 hours) to work exclusively on the assessment.
- Start a dialogue about sustainability with your employees, put together a sustainability team for the assessment.