December 2023
Allison English, Deputy CEO
We’ve undergone a big change here that isn’t talked much about but is a massive milestone in terms of growth and development – my four-year-old started reception. He’s in a new environment with new people learning new things, and the majority of our conversations these days centre around kindness: kindness towards his classmates, kindness towards his little sister, and kindness towards himself, particularly when he is having trouble grasping a new concept.
Leesman’s been on a similar journey in the same timeframe. Just before my son was born back in 2019, Tim, Leesman’s Founder & CEO, and I decided that we wanted to become a B Corp. The B Corp movement embodied everything we aspired to be as an organisation, which in a word can be summed up as kind: kind to our employees and suppliers, kind to the environment, kind to both our clients and the community around us. I spent some of my Keeping in Touch (KIT) days on parental leave diving into the details about the B Corp framework and assessing what improvements we could make to benefit us as an organisation and help us become a B Corp.
March 2020 is a time seared in most people’s memory for another reason though, and the pandemic undoubtedly threw a wrench in our plans, delaying the timeline within which we wanted to apply to become a B Corp. But it also transformed how the world approached work, and we haven’t lost that heightened sense of kindness and humanity with which we approach employees and the various circumstances that impact life and therefore work, ultimately having a positive impact on our team as well as our B Corp score. We spent a year continuing to look for opportunities like this to think differently about how we’d approached various aspects of our business, and within a year, we were ready to click the “submit” button on our application.
They say, “good things come to those who wait,” and we patiently waited in the queue until our turn for certification came up. We then found out we were one of many organisations in the process of appraising how they balance purpose and profit, as normal wait times of a few months were extended to over a year.
Being a B Corp isn’t a tick-box exercise. It isn’t done because it directly impacts the bottom line, or because there is a definitive ROI. We decided to become a B Corp because we knew it was the right thing to do. It perfectly aligns with our purpose, which is to help organisations make workplaces better, as well as one of Leesman’s founding principles, the free dissemination of knowledge. It’s why we have never charged to attend one of our events and why all of our research is freely available to download on our website. The data and insights to build a better workplace for employees shouldn’t be only accessible to those who can pay for them.
It offers a framework to continue to do better, so we can keep improving policies to benefit our employees, we can make decisions that have a positive impact on the environment, and we can be part of the social fabric and communities within which we live and work. Business don’t exist without the people who work for them – although looking at how many businesses are run, you wouldn’t think many business leaders know or value that. We wanted to make a statement that we do value people. We don’t always get it right, and when we don’t we try to remember to be kind to ourselves, but we do our best and will continue to do that.
We went through a re-certification process this year and were thrilled to maintain our B Corp certification. That means we are a certified B Corp for the next three years and will recertify again in 2026. The work though is never actually done. As the framework for the B Impact Assessment evolves, as our business matures, and as we continue to look for ways to improve, we continue to evolve, making iterative changes to keep improving. There is always kindness at the heart of that – kindness towards our employees, without whom we don’t have a business at all, kindness towards the clients who trust us with their data, kindness towards the environment and the world we live in that facilitates the work that we do, and kindness towards ourselves.
We may be a bit more than four years into our B Corp journey, and while we have made an incredible amount of progress, the journey really is just beginning. The challenge now is to find the opportunities to B more B Corp, both in our corporate lives and in our personal lives. The principles and challenges that underpin B Corp certification aren’t unique to the business world, so to truly embrace these principles we too must examine how we live our lives in all aspects and how we can do better. I think kindness is a good place to start.
