B Corp – the BIA
We’ve started working through one of the most challenging elements of the B Corp process – the B Impact Assessment (BIA). The BIA asks companies to evaluate their impact across multiple areas – governance, workers, community, environment, customers, and various disclosures. While this can feel like a relatively straightforward task if you’ve got tangible products, offices, and a massive HR department, for a professional services SME who is remote-first service-based company, there are some interesting challenges.
Why is it hard?
The depth and breadth of questions in the BIA require a LOT of thoughtful reflection. For us it’s uncovered things not previously considered and other areas we are going to have to gather data from scratch.
Environmental impact
We’re looking at what we should be measuring and how we measure it for environmental impact. We all work from home or client offices. We’re a professional services company that has no physical product or product supply chain. No offices to measure with detailed calculations of utilities and waste production. No data centres of our own. The coffee we buy can be ethically sourced, but it’s just fuelling internal thinking time, so may not have the materiality we should consider.
We do use cloud services and the data centres our data sits in have an impact. Our home office spaces consume energy. We travel to meet our clients, run workshops and deliver training.
For us the challenge is twofold: first, understanding all the factors that contribute to our environmental impact, and second, figuring out how to measure and minimise that impact in a meaningful way. We’re learning a whole new language of ‘scope 3’ and materiality. This is one of the key areas we’ll be working more with the University of Bath MSc students on.
Ever thought about your bank?
Most companies don’t think beyond basic financial metrics when choosing their bank. Questions like ‘how does your financial institution align with your values?’ or ‘have they signed up to an ethical values framework?’ might seem trivial or even unnecessary for businesses just trying to avoid high fees or poor customer service. Yet, the BIA asks businesses to think critically about the broader social and environmental consequences of their financial decisions alongside everything else. So now we’re looking at alternative banks – not an action we were expecting.
These are just a couple of examples. This process is evolving our criteria for decision-making all over the place.
The BIA essentially forces companies to define what ‘better’ means, which can be pretty difficult. It’s a balancing act between idealism and practicality – deciding how far we’re willing to go to align operations with our values. The balance between people, the planet, and profits.
This makes the process difficult, but also valuable. By pushing us to ask hard questions, it ultimately helps us build more thoughtful, sustainable, and impactful business practices. Hopefully!
How it’s good too
On the ‘good things we’ve realised through doing this’ side, there is good we do already and evidence we have been making good decisions. This is heartening when you’re facing all of the questions that you’d not even thought of before!
Questions around ‘community engagement’ are relevant to what we’ve done and do for our bidding community. We instigated and wrote PAS 360 – a free standard to help organisations get better at what they do. We quietly transformed the governance of the APMP UK chapter by developing real checks and balances in NEDs, policy, and good governance. We organise free events for community connections because they were not happening any more. We’ve been doing all of this because we are part of our community and have an urge to contribute.
Another of the unexpected benefits is that the process can inspire new ideas and improvements that may not have been considered before. Working through the BIA triggered an idea for a better way to approach competency matrices, career paths, and assessments that is not just ‘what we reckon’ so it’s more transferable to new employers and opens up career paths more systematically and fairly.
A key principle of the BIA is that it’s not about gaming the system or maximising your score for the sake of it. Instead, it’s about driving real, meaningful improvements. It’s easy to fall into the trap of doing things just to earn more points – implementing policies or practices that look good on paper (or more likely on the website) but don’t actually improve the business or have a positive impact. The real value of the BIA comes when you balance the drive for a higher score (doing the right thing) with the need to be authentic and true to your company’s values, it’s people, and clients.
What next?
We’re in the earliest days of the journey through the BIA, and watching changes to the process coming over the horizon (a WHOLE other post). It will not be easy, but that’s not the point.