Celebrating B Corp month: How are we doing and what does it mean for you?

We’re another year into our B Corp journey, dedicating ourselves to that continual commitment: to make business a force for good.

But how are we doing, and most importantly what does that mean for you?

Where it all began

The B Corp movement began back in 2006 in the United States with that simple philosophy: to ‘make business a force for good’.

Since then, it has become a global force, with more than 4500 businesses around the world signing up to those shared ideals and pursuing a goal of making business better.

The five keys

The performance and progress of all certified B Corps is measured against five key criteria. It is down to us to demonstrate continual commitment in each of these areas.

Governance: B Corp business are required to consider the interests of customers, workers, suppliers, local communities and the environment in their decision making. That means they’re unlikely to make decisions that would adversely affect one or more of these groups.

Community: This is about the way B Corp businesses interact with the local community, affecting everything from the way we hire employees to diversity and inclusion and charitable activity.

Workers: Looking after employees and their wellbeing is key here – from fairness to career development and beyond.

Environment: Another key area of being a B Corp is how we treat the environment – not only in our own activities, but also the impact of our suppliers too.

Customers: Doing the right thing by our customers has always been a top priority at Zen, but now it’s a requirement under B Corp too.

Our performance so far

Last year we set a series of objectives to improve our performance as a B Corp and with the scores now in, we’re happy to say that our Governance, Community, Workers and Customer scores all improved.

Our biggest improvement (in terms of the score we were awarded) came in the Community category, where we had a particularly strong year. In the last financial year, our people raised almost £12,000 for local charities through a range of activities like our 84-mile Hadrian’s Wall Challenge and lots of other charity events.

We encourage all our people to make use of their annual paid volunteer days, so it’s about more than just money raised but also practical help too.

But back to the subject of money, we’re also delighted to match every pound raised by our people to make sure that even more goes towards the worthy causes we support.

And what about our customers?

We’re always looking for ways to improve your experience, which is why we introduced our How To YouTube channel. Here you’ll find nearly 50 videos (and growing) devoted to helping you better self-serve, which can help you to more quickly get your services up and running and iron out minor problems (we’re still here to talk to you should you need it though).

We also relaunched our Knowledge Base, which contains a wealth of information to help you manage and troubleshoot your Zen services. Last year also saw us launch an ethical marketing policy and the beginning of our router refurbishment policy.

Better for everybody

A lot of the things we do for a B Corp we have always prided ourselves on doing anyway. Our commitment to ‘happy staff’, ‘happy customers’ and ‘happy suppliers’ has long been our most fundamental long-term objective.

But our B Corp membership brings those commitments into even keener focus. We are now required as a business to put people, the community, and the environment first and to strive for continual improvement.

If you’re interested in finding out more about our performance over the last year, you can find all the details in our annual B Corp Impact Assessment Report. There you’ll be able to read about our commitments for the last year and how we performed against each, as well as what we have planned for the year ahead.

To find out more about B Corp and Zen, visit our page here.