A big and exciting part of a business wanting to make their business more socially and environmental responsible is thinking about doing business in a new, better way. It’s moving away from just thinking about the business being profitable, to thinking about how it can be a force for good – solving social and environmental challenges, empowering staff, collaborating with suppliers and the community on doing common good…
One way of making these changes is to embark on the journey to become B Corp certified. The questions lead you towards making lots of little improvements throughout the business, however, I would say these are the biggies that make the most difference.
1. Stakeholder mapping & materiality assessment
A great place to start is to sit down and identify the areas where you have the most social and environmental impact – where you most influence the outside world and where the outside world influences you the most. Identify your most important stakeholders and ask them how well they think you are doing in these areas and where you could improve.
From there, it’s good to develop measurable social and environmental objectives based on these areas where you can most influence – at a company level, then cascade down to teams and individuals.
By taking this first step, it gives your business the chance to look at the bigger picture and make sure you are focusing your time and effort into improvement initiatives that you know will have the biggest impact, rather than guessing.
2. Do a Greenhouse Gas footprint analysis of your whole business
Include everything that you spend money on and throw away, in order to get the most comprehensive and fair footprint.
This is a big data collection job, I know! But if you don’t know your baseline, you won’t know where to start in making environmental improvements. Following this, identify the areas where you have your biggest emissions and set some reduction targets, with a plan of how to achieve them.
3. Pay all workers, at least, the Real Living Wage
The Real Living Wage in UK is £12/hour outside London and £13.15 in London.
This is so important to show your workers how much you value them and empower them to be economically secure.
Paying a real Living Wage improves the employer brand, boosts staff productivity and motivation at work.
The Living Wage Foundation have also found paying a real Living Wage helps employers to remain competitive, retain existing staff and attract new staff.
– Over 1/2 employers said paying a real Living Wage has improved the quality of applications for jobs
– Over 1/3 of employers also reported that the Living Wage helped the organisation secure contracts and funding
4. Ensure your bank & pension providers are ethical
Who you choose to bank and invest with has a huge impact!
Take a look at bank.green to check your current bank’s social & environmental track record. A lot of the big banks are still investing heavily into the fossil fuel and other controversial industries.
This calculator https://calculator.mymothertree.com/ is great to get advice on the best ethical banking and pension options for you.
5. Screen your suppliers & customers
Once you’ve got your own house in order, you can have a huge positive ripple effect by setting your minimum social & environmental expectations with suppliers and clients by using an ethical code of conduct.
If you can then lead on to doing more detailed assessments of what they are practically doing to look after their people and the environment, you will encourage great positive change.
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👋 I am Camilla 🌱 I work with leaders of innovative tech scale-ups and businesses with high environmental impact, who are near the beginning of their sustainability journey, and need support to reduce their environmental impact and attract talent or who want to become B Corp certified but aren’t sure how to achieve it
👉 Providing business sustainability support and guidance
🔝 Connect with me if you are interested in #bcorp #sustainablebusiness #talentattraction or Reducing your business’ environmental impact
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