Albert Goodman Achieves B Corp Certification
Praxity would like to extend its congratulations to the UK’s Albert Goodman, who have recently achieved B Corp certification for their work in sustainable business and ethical governance. Read on to see why the firm wanted to get certified, and how they achieved it.
With Corporate Social Responsibility and ESG reporting becoming more and more standardised, as well as more popular with investors, having a credible benchmark in these areas is of ever more importance. B Lab is an international non-profit organisation that provides robust certification of a business’ positive work on social and environmental factors. They provide detailed parameters that any firm must hit to achieve certification.
Redefining the purpose and role of business is B Lab’s mission, and their B Corp certification provides a rigorous set of standards for companies to follow, in return for concrete certification of CSR credentials. They help to guide businesses that sincerely want to alter their relationship to the world, identifying several unsustainable features of capital generation. As they put it:
“We’ve identified three key aspects that reinforce the problematic role of business: the design of legal systems; business behaviour and operations; and corporate culture and the dominant narratives around business and success.
This leads to three types of negative impacts that we see across societies and cultures: structural social and economic inequality; environmental degradation and resource extraction; and the decline of individual well-being and loss of social cohesion.”
Praxity member firm Albert Goodman has just achieved B Corp certification after a long and intensive process, assessing their whole output and behaviour as a business. This has ethical considerations at its root, but also has a bearing on the firm’s commercial offering. Robin Clempson, Director of Marketing at the firm, opens up about the reasons they undertook this journey:
“We’d been working really hard at our collective CSR efforts across charitable work and green initiatives, and we felt that B Corp status was a really nice way of formally bringing all of this together. It’s a rigorous process but also one that we felt sets the gold standard for businesses that want to be about more than just profit. From a commercial point of view, we also felt that increasingly our clients and potential future clients expect this more ethical level of behaviour from their suppliers.”
For Albert Goodman, the process was long but worthwhile. Taking around 18 months from start to finish, the firm needed to answer a huge range of questions, with each answer requiring supporting evidence. This covered many strands of how the organisation is run, from community outreach work to corporate governance, as well as exploring the firm’s marketing ethics. B Corp certification is holistic and doesn’t focus on any one environmental or social metric, emphasising the broad thinking needed for firms to properly engage with the company’s mission.
With Albert Goodman being committed to the task, the sheer rigour required in gaining certification provides the firm with a clear selling point. Robin adds:
“I feel like it’s a clear indicator of what our firm is about, making it easier for businesses that share these values to work with us. Because the bar is to get the certification is quite high, and with the need to re-certify every 3 years, I don’t think other firms will get B Corp status unless they are fully committed. We hope it could be a powerful differentiator for us, both from a recruitment and from a client acquisition point of view.”
To achieve certification, firms must achieve an impact assessment score of 80 or above and pass B Lab’s risk review. They must be transparent about their performance, making their measurement against B Lab standards publicly available. Finally, the certification involves changing corporate governance structure to be accountable to all stakeholders, not just shareholders. This constitutes a legal commitment to the B Corp vision and is a serious statement of intent by any firm.
Working with the United Nations Global Compact, B Labs have produced the SDG Action Manager – a self-assessment tool to help businesses understand their contribution to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to plan for improvements. This gives firms a starting point if they wish to become B Corp certified. There are also pathways for start-ups and smaller companies, as well as for large multi-nationals.
While B Corp certification and wider ethical business practices may be a positive change, the existence of high standards and quantifiable measurements mean that firms cannot simply claim to have social and ethical concerns – they have to prove it. This could be difficult for larger firms, who have many clients in different industries, or for firms with a partnership model, as getting buy-in from all the relevant stakeholders could be challenging.
What is clear is that many firms seek to get ahead of the curve in their ESG and CSR commitments, seeing them as crucial to talent recruitment and retention, investor confidence and stakeholder engagement. They are also correctly seen as excellent risk management tools, with robust and transparent governance being of huge importance. Robin Clempson sees it this way:
“Our primary strategic goal is to remain an independent firm, and we feel that our B Corp status supports that by setting us apart from our competitors, giving our people a very clear identity as to what we are about.”
Sending out the message that the firm cares about both its future and that of wider society helps to differentiate Albert Goodman, showing their commitment to sustainable operation. Praxity would like to sincerely congratulate the firm on achieving the certification.
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