B Corp month 2023: How we're performing and what that means for you

After another 12 months of our B Corp journey, we thought now was a good time to reflect on our progress to date.

In case you’re not aware, March is officially B Corp month. It’s the one month of the year when all B Corp businesses around the globe pause to celebrate each other’s achievements and the theme for 2023 is ‘going beyond’.

We’ll have plenty more content for you in March to hopefully showcase some of the ways that Zen goes beyond to help our people, our customers, our local community and even our planet.

We’re proud of being a certified B Corp, and we’re always looking at ways to improve what we do.

Which brings us to the first part of the title of this article. How are we performing?

2022 B Corp Impact Assessment Report

One of the most important parts of being a B Corp is being upfront and transparent with our progress. What have we changed and improved over the last year, and where are the places where we’re still lacking?

Our latest annual Impact Assessment Report covers all that and more in detail, focusing on the five key pillars of B Corp membership: Governance, Community, Workers, Environment and Customers.

You can access the full report here.

We’re proud to say that the scores we achieved for 2022 in a number of those areas reflect significant improvement, with our greatest success coming in the Community category.

And that comes as no surprise to us. In 2022, our people raised nearly £12,000 for local charities through a range of fundraising activities and, as ever, this figure was matched by Zen to ensure that even more money was donated to worthy causes.

But beyond the fundraising, many of our people also took advantage of their paid volunteering days to provide practical support to lots of local initiatives. Making a difference in our communities is really important to us, and we’re incredibly proud of the contribution we’ve been able to make.

The report also indicates improvements elsewhere too. In 2021/2022 we became an official Great Place to Work®, became the only Which? Recommended Provider for broadband for a second consecutive year and rolled out lots of schemes to help our customers. Take our How To YouTube channel, for example, which contains nearly 50 videos to help our customers better self-serve, or our revamped Knowledge Base that contains a library of useful information.

Failure to hit some of our demanding targets has caused us to redouble our efforts. In the Environment category we failed to perform as well as we had in the previous year – largely because we were unable to reduce our energy usage by as much as we had in those 12 months. The result has been a large-scale deployment of solar panels at our HQ to further reduce our dependence on non-renewable energy. And this has in fact contributed to us having our commitments to Net Zero approved by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi).

But what does that mean for you?

We believe that our ongoing commitment to a better and fairer way of doing business is better for our customers too.

Being a Zen customer means being aligned to a business that’s dedicated to putting people and planet first.

And with our Net Zero commitments being formalised, that can also help you with your own Net Zero commitments too.

Being a certified B Corp means more than just doing the right thing though. While this is clearly the most important thing, B Corp certification is also a great way of attracting like-minded customers, suppliers and even recruits. That why we would encourage all our business customers to explore the possibility of B Corp membership. Not only is B Corp membership a great source of pride, it might just help you to gain an edge over your competitors too.