Sorry Shakespeare, I feel like I’m doing you dirty here.
As a self-proclaimed ‘sustainable‘ web agency working alongside other sustainable businesses, one of the things that regularly comes up when talking with prospects and partners is: are you a certified B Corp™?
A “B Corp™” is a business that has been certified by B Labs as meeting a series of social, environmental and governance standards. Some see it as the pinnacle of independently verified certifications, a mark of accountability to a set standard. It’s certainly a strong signal that a business might care about the world around us. But… is it really all that? And how can we be sure that certified businesses are actually holding themselves to a given ethical standard?
I won’t bury the lede much further here: Ultimately Better is not a certified B Corp™, and probably won’t ever be. Why? Because it’s really hard to get on board with the notion that B Labs are about ethics and sustainability when subsidiary brands of global companies like Nestlé are on their books. Nestlé, the company that advertises its palm oil use as sustainable but can’t rule out deforestation for nearly a third of it. Nestlé, the company whose CEO argued that water was a market commodity, not a fundamental human right.
But let’s forget about Nestlé – the most boycotted company on the planet – for a second and look at the B Corp™ assessment criteria more broadly. The B Impact Assessment looks at things like:
- governance, or how a company is structured legally
- how a company treats its employees including pay, benefits and job flexibility
- how the company affects the community it operates in including diversity and equity policies
- how the company affects the environment, and lastly,
- how the company treats their customers
That all sounds fairly reasonable. So reasonable, in fact, that some of us have operated with those areas in mind since conception – some of us have published diversity policies, job flexibility, fair pay and written customer commitments – and don’t need our arms twisting into improving to meet an arbitrary third party standard.
B Corp™ standards shouldn’t be something that we rush around to meet once every few years so we get to stick a shiny badge on our websites, it should be a baseline for any business. Ultimately, treating people and the planet fairly shouldn’t be a marketing angle.