Engaging your workplace in your B Corp journey

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Hi all

We are a recently minted B Corp and our attention is now turning to how to engage a small committee of B Corp ‘champions’ within our organisation. Just wondering if anyone would be willing to share their experiences of how they went about this in their own organisations? We’ve already done a team-wide education session about B Corp, this is more about getting together a ‘working committee’ to keep the conversations going and, more imporantly, keep improving! Any ideas welcome…

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Great question @Tami. I’m curious what large companies like Beyond Bank (cc @KateCarroll @afenton) and Kathmandu do as they have large dispersed workforces that need to be across certification and what it means for their businesses/customers.

I feel like there was a webinar on this some while ago… not sure if Kate or @Kiraday can point us in the right direction.

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@Tami and @alisonmichalk Absolutely!

Kathmandu recently ran Meaning in Business (MIB) trainings for all of their staff - I will see if Gary or Olivia can share some of the content from this!

Liberty Financial also has a team dedicated to B Corp. @rhughjones might be able to share some pointers.

@Clare from Springload might have more to share too. :slight_smile:

If there’s interest, I’d be happy to host a webinar ASAP to help share some tips & best practice for engaging your team + project planning the BIA. Feel free to reach out if you’d like to take part or have ideas for this!

There are some great articles on B the Change (the US/Canada blog) about this as well, plus our online short course which is great for getting people up to speed!

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Hi Tami!

We have a bit of a mixed system.

  • Myself and a few of the senior leadership team have been through the Impact assessment a few times to identify action we can take to increase our scores in each of the impact areas. And the ideas that came out of this were given out to people to progress how they see fit. And they in turn have involved members of their own departments to work on the ideas. So very much a top-down situation.
  • We have some team members that are regularly meeting as their BAU to think of ways Springload can be more impactful. e.g. The Procurement team do a lot of work around our supply chain. So while it’s not an official B Corp working group, our B Corp score will definitely benefit from the work they do! And I try to keep them across how the changes they make effect our score to help keep the connection.
  • We also have a couple of open working groups for specific area’s like Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. People dip in and out of the D&I committee depending on workload, with a couple of constant attendees who keep the work moving forward. We put a call out to the team to see who wanted to be a part of it, with a cap of 8 people. (We are a company of 75) First come first served. And it naturally rotates every now and again.

I think it’s important to have people involved who have the ability to make change. And prioritise the work.
But also good to do a call out to see who would like to be involved. If you can find a balance between the two then you are onto a winner!

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Fantastic, thanks Clare!

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Thanks Kira

We have a lot in common with the approach Clare outlined. We formed a Leadership B Corp Working Group (LWG) that meets monthly and comprises 10 Group Managers. This team covers our key asset classes as well as our Community and Culture team, our hardship team and Legal.

The team meets monthly and around every six months makes a presentation on approach and progress to other leaders in the business. This means that while the LWG develops recommendations for action, these are reviewed by the broader leadership team and the CEO. This ensures alignment with the company’s strategic objectives and priorities.

Some B Corp initiatives are easy and quick to implement and others are not. Indeed some may not be perfectly aligned to the business - we are a financial services group. Some take investment in time, money and people, which is why the governance structure and process we have set up works really well.

In between the monthly meetings, members of the LWG have accountability for implementing agreed initiatives.

We have also found the B Impact Assessment to be a key tool. Using the tool means we know our score in real time and its better than using the a spreadsheet in dealing with the gated questions. All members of the LWG have access to the tool so that we can see in real time what we are doing.

Happy to talk further,

Rupert

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Great question! We have a new B Corp comms plan that includes a decent chunk of targeted staff activity.

We’ve just released our 2021 Corporate Report this week, and it has a lot of B-Corp related content. We are using our internal newsletter and yammer to let staff know about it. Plus we are targeting specific staff with some information sessions.

We will be using a number of case studies from our Corporate Report on our social, website and intranet to try and demonstrate impact.

We are running two staff competitions this year - the first to ask them what working for a B-Corp means to them. We had some great responses and we will be using them on our social. The second will be to help us develop an “elevator pitch” about us being a B Corp. Once we’ve settled on it, we’ll roll it out to everyone so that we are all singing from the same songsheet.

We will be working across the business over the next 12months to try and demonstrate and report impact better. We don’t have everything right - we are definitely on a journey but I think our staff should be really proud by what we’ve achieved so far. Our job is to get them involved and have frequent conversations about it.

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Awesome, thanks Alison - those are great ideas!

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We’re working on revamping some resources, and I just found this deck from a webinar with the Hatched (@Timothy_O) and SilverChef (@WendyMcCormick) team in 2019. :slight_smile: Might be of interest @Tami!

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Fantastic, thanks Kira!