After 15 years, the B Corp Certification standards that have been in place since the first B Corps were founded in 2007 are getting a massive overhaul.
The latest draft of the standards was recently released by B Lab, after an extensive development process that has involved stakeholder engagement, public consultations, surveys, and focus groups over a 3-year period.
If you’re curious about what this means for your B Corp, you’re not alone! As a B Consultant focusing solely on helping companies to certify and recertify as B Corps, I’ve been following these developments closely and fielding questions from clients, colleagues, and friends in the community concerned about how the changes will affect them.
Here’s what we know about the changes:
The process of answering questions on the B Impact Assessment to earn points, with the goal of attaining the magic number of 80 needed for B Corp certification, is going away. Instead, companies will need to meet a set of requirements across 9 Core Topics to certify or recertify as B Corps.
My biggest takeaway after reviewing the latest draft of the standards – a release so massive that B Lab had to create a microsite to capture the information in a 500+ page PDF – was this:
B Lab has prepared us well.
In other words, there were no huge surprises in the new draft standards. There were refinements and additional contextualization, more specificity and details, and the introduction of possible recognition mechanisms.
However, the basic structure that they’ve been proposing – of Core Topics with specific requirements in each – hasn’t changed. Even many of the requirements haven’t changed significantly from the previous draft. The draft standards are consistent with what we saw after the first draft was released in 2022 and again after the release of the May 2023 consultation report.
What has changed is that we now have a better idea of how the requirements will be contextualized for different companies, especially for the many small businesses that were concerned that the standards would be too hard for them to meet. The new standards show that a lot of thought went into how to apply the requirements to small businesses.
One example that illustrates this is the requirement around Fair Wages. While the new standards do state that the family living wage will be used – a change that is consistent with other living wage standards that do not differentiate between individual and family living wages – they also provide options for how companies can meet that requirement, given the complexities around prevailing living wages and benefits around the world.
To address this, the draft standards propose different ways that a company can meet this requirement. For example, the company can either pay a family living wage, or it can pay 75% of the family living wage if the company’s high-to-low pay ratio is 10:1 or less. There are other options, but for the sake of simplicity, this is one that will apply to many B Corps. It demonstrates how the standards are contextualized, meaning that they’re applied in an appropriate way given the size of the company.
Preparing Yourself for the New Standards
The magnitude of this change is causing some anxiety in the B Corp community, a common reaction during times of change.
This is especially true for people who have been in the community for a long time, as they wonder if their companies will be able to remain B Corps now that the requirements they’ve been meeting for so long will be completely different.
As a B Corp leader in your company, whether it’s a company of 1 or 1,000, you can navigate this transition by first making sure that you are personally prepared by drawing upon helpful practices for managing change.
First, take a deep breath and maintain perspective of where a change to the B Corp standards fits in the grand scheme of things. Yes, it’s big – and, it’s also manageable.
If your company is already a B Corp, you’re an early adopter of a global change movement, so trust in your own strength and resilience as a leader to face what lies ahead. You’ve got this!
Exercise your own agency and familiarize yourself with the new standards so that you can replace fear of the unknown with a clear understanding of what will be expected of you; this is within your locus of control and can help alleviate the sense that you’re powerless over the change that lies ahead.
Preparing Your Team for the New Standards
In addition to preparing on a personal level, this is a good time to engage your team.
First, if you haven’t done so already, be sure to set up a B Team. This is usually a cross-functional team that works on B Corp certification and recertification, ensuring that the company is implementing and building upon the best practices demonstrated through the standards.
Educate your team about the new standards. The new standards are available for review and feedback. At Cultivating Capital, we’ll be continuing our Learning Sessions to explore how companies can prepare to meet these standards through our online community, the B Impact Collective.
Evaluate how you’re performing against the new standards already to get a realistic sense of where you are doing well and where you might need to improve.
Lean into the B Corp community – there are literally thousands of other people facing this same change, and you don’t have to go through this alone; many of us are here to support you.
Lastly, remember that B Lab has been transparent throughout this process, dating back to 2020, and they aren’t expecting companies to switch to the new standards overnight. Transition plans will be developed to let you know when your company will need to meet the new standards.
Are you ready for the new standards?
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