What was involved?
To achieve BCorp Certification we needed to demonstrate that we were meeting high standards of performance, accountability, and transparency on factors from employee benefits and charitable giving to supply chain practices and input materials. In order to achieve certification, we needed to:
- Demonstrate high social and environmental performance by achieving a B Impact Assessment score of 80 or above and passing a risk review.
- Make a legal commitment by changing our corporate governance structure to be accountable to all stakeholders, not just shareholders, and achieve benefit corporation status if available in their jurisdiction.
- Exhibit transparency by allowing information about our performance measured against B Lab’s standards to be publicly available on our BCorp profile on B Lab’s website.
The Experience
Some of the requirements we felt confident in such as the approach we had to being an ethical employer; being a Living Wage employer, providing training, having the policies in place to protect staff.
The assessment process led us to assess our team diversity. What we found was the team, although relatively small represented a large number of disadvantaged groups. We made a decision to recruit through the KickStarter scheme so we could contribute to supporting local young talent into our sector but we had no such targeted plan to increase diversity in our recruitment generally.
What we did have was a determination to recruit the best people we could find and we were happy to search far and wide for them. We didn’t notice the differences in backgrounds, disabilities, ethnicity or sexual orientation. Our connection with fellow geeks who got lost in a shared enthusiasm for what we do blinded us to our differences and we just saw people we wanted to add to our team.
What comes next?
We are delighted to have achieved this accolade, we know that we haven’t finished. We need to continually improve and therefore since achieving BCorp, we’re working on developing more support for employees eg. compressed working hours (10 days in 9), we have a vacancy for a term time only role to support a parent needing to juggle school holiday child care costs. We are introducing a company electric car scheme to make electric cars more affordable, and there are plenty more ideas to come.
Ongoing development is crucial in our business. Legislation is always changing as are the risks, so continually learning and scanning the horizon for new risks that may face us and our clients is essential. Maintaining a diverse training plan will be key to this so we will continue to invest time in formal training such as ISO Lead Auditor courses as well as apprenticeships (4 members of the team are on the CMI Leadership level 5 course) and complimented this with on the job training, relevant webinars and ‘soft skill’ training to further strengthen our collective learning.
We remain committed to contributing to the wider community around us and we will maintain our support for community groups delivering free Cyber security training. Helen will continue to represent small businesses on the West Midlands FSB for cyber crime as well as continuing to promote cyber safety by sitting on the Advisory Group of the West Midlands Cyber Resilience Centre.
We will be seeking more opportunities to share our expertise for the benefit of the community we work in and working with B Lab, the non-profit behind BCorps to share the best practice they have identified.
Lastly, we will place more value on the things we take for granted. Much of what we do that has gained us such a high score in the assessment can easily be eroded as we grow or when things get busy. We will be considering how we share our way of working and thinking with new team members to maintain what we have achieved and improve it as we evolve.
