Q&A with Hubertine Roessingh on B Corp in Europe

Hubertine Roessingh from B Lab Europe, Director Benelux, speaks to Fusion Associates about the B Corp movement and how it has been received in Europe.

Q&A with Grishma Jashapara, Managing Partner at Fusion Associates.

Hubertine Roessingh

Director B Lab Benelux

Tell us a little about yourself and your journey to where you are now in your career as Director for B Lab Benelux.

I grew up in the Netherlands, but have lived across the world in India, Brazil, Thailand, Tanzania, USA and Switzerland. These experiences have changed and enriched me in many ways, but most importantly they have shown me the interdependencies of this one precious planet on which we all live and interact. As a student I had a strong belief that the corporate sector could be a major catalyst for change to drive positive impact. Conducting a research assignment for Heineken International on their local CSR policies and practices in Thailand supported these beliefs and paved the way forward in this domain. For over 15 years, my passion and profession was to guide companies in ways that are more socially and environmentally responsible.

I started in 2005 with setting up a boutique consultancy agency to support companies with their CSR and sustainability strategies. From there, I moved into the corporate world living in Switzerland and working for The North Face (part of VF Corporation) leading the brand’s social & environmental agenda in EMEA. With my return to the Netherlands my previous experiences equipped me well for my new role at B Lab Europe. I had the honor of being the first hire and went on the mission of building and growing the European B Corp movement together with our local country partners to get this off the ground. In the meantime I’ve shifted roles from a European level to focus on one of the key markets as Director of B Lab Benelux. As a mother of 3 young kids, I do my best to leave this world better than I found it. That’s why I feel fortunate that my professional life has merged so naturally with my beliefs for creating a better world.

What is the purpose, philosophy and objective behind B Lab and the B Corporation certification?

B Lab, the non-profit behind the B Corp movement, was created in 2006 for the purpose of serving a global movement of people using business as a force for good, so that all companies will compete to be not only the best in the world but also best for the world, and as a result society will enjoy a shared and durable prosperity for all. The vision of B Lab is to capture the power within all businesses to measure their impact with as much rigor as they measure their profits. B Lab’s tools and methods allow companies to evaluate, manage, set and improve on high standards for their non-financial performance considering all stakeholders, not just shareholders.

With a wide variety of brands like Patagonia, the Bodyshop, Athleta (part of Gap corporation), Eileen Fisher, the Guardian Media Group and Ben & Jerry’s, there are nearly 3500 certified B Corps in more than 70 countries covering 130 sectors and over 70,000 users of the B Impact Assessment.

What exactly is a B Corp and how can a company qualify for certification?

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B Corps are companies certified by the non-profit organization B Lab. There are three pillars to B Corp certification: meeting rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, transparency around that performance, and accountability. Alone, none of these pillars are sufficient. Together, they make the B Corp Certification unique, credible, and meaningful.

Let me briefly explain those three pillars, as these form the fundaments of all B Corps worldwide.

1) To qualify for certification, companies must achieve every three years a minimum verified score on the B Impact assessment —a rigorous assessment of a company’s impact on its governance, workers, customers, community, and environment. The assessment is followed by a two-hour interview to verify the answers with B Lab.

2) To ensure transparency, each B Corp will get a public profile showing their B Impact Report on bcorporation.net.

3) Certified B Corporations are obliged to amend their legal governing documents - articles of association - to require their board of directors to balance profit and purpose by considering all stakeholders.

B Corp Certification doesn’t just evaluate a product or service (eg. like Fair Trade, Organic or LEED); it assesses the overall positive impact of the company as a whole that stands behind it. And increasingly, that’s what people care most about. Where we work, where we shop, what we buy, who we invest in, what we create – is becoming a source of identity and purpose.

Obtaining B Corp certification isn’t a walk in the park. We want to keep raising the bar of the certification to ensure its quality and credibility across the globe. The assessments takes time and requires buy-in from your senior management team and the commitment from key topic-owners across departments. Also, once becoming a B Corp, it is not a final destination, rather an ongoing journey of improving and enhancing the business.

Often I’m asked the question Is B Corp a certification? Yes it is a third-party certification, and it’s much more than that. With the B Corp certification, a company steps into a community of like-minded businesses, driving a global movement of people using business as a force for good to solve societal challenges.

How has B Corp been received in Europe?

Inspired by B Lab, B Lab Europe was launched in 2015 for the purpose of redefining success in businesses and the economy in Europe. Since the start of B Lab Europe it has gained remarkable traction with approaching 800 certified B Corps and nearly 20,000 European users of the B Impact Assessment, the numbers keep growing. The European movement is underpinned by a network of different entities – certified B Corps, Country partner representatives, B Leaders and the small team of B Lab Europe.

Before B Corp set foot on European grounds, many countries had their own social enterprise or solidarity economy movements with different legal models on offer for mission-driven companies. There was a fertile ground for the B Corp certification, as many companies were in essence a B Corp already even before the introduction of “B Corp”. We were welcomed with plenty of excitement, curiosity and sincere interest. Nevertheless, at the start of B Lab Europe we also felt initial resistance and questioning coming from some of the European markets. The “not-invented-here-syndrome” and “why should we embrace and adopt an American standard” were some of the market feedback we received.

We were well aware that there would not be a one-size fits all for Europe and that it wouldn’t be a matter of “just” copy-pasting the American market approach nor the Sistema B (B Lab South-America), or the Australian way of working. We learned a lot from those more mature B Corp markets, so our approach was to copy and adjust, improve and make it locally fit just right. The network of B Lab Europe’s country partners was vital in providing a solid base to build a thriving European B Corp movement. We need the local flavours, adopt our wording to local language, be sensitive to culture and be mindful of the country specific stages of building the new economy. Today we see that B Corps are a welcome addition in Europe to the new ecosystem of alternative business models.

What are the benefits of becoming a Certified B-Corp?

There are different reasons for companies to certify as a B Corp. The most important benefits are:

Build relationships and lead a movement
When a company certifies as a B Corporation, it joins a global community of business leaders. B Lab helps to foster the community by holding events and bringing B Corps together. This community is more than a loose network of “members”; there is a strong connection and willingness amongst B Corps to do business, to learn and exchange with peers, and to stand together as leaders to amplify the voice of the movement. Joining this community widens the outreach and impact of individual companies and inspires others to follow suit.

Improve impact
Maintaining B Corp Certification through the B Impact Assessment is a powerful mechanism to help a company strategically set goals for improvement, create more positive social and environmental impact, and track performance over time. It is not only a measurement tool but also a management tool. The assessment helps cross-departmental efforts for employees to work closely together as a team and to rally around a common agenda – one that creates a sense of ownership and responsibility about measuring and managing what matters most to the company.

Enhance the brand
The third-party validation that comes with B Corp Certification helps companies stand out in the crowd by earning trust and brand loyalty in the midst of today’s greenwashing and window-dressing practices. The B Corp seal has become a badge of honor as well as a unique selling point that many B Corps put on their products, website and sales materials. Also, the B Corp certification provides a rigorous means of measuring progress, a strong plus for reporting to boards, investors, employees, consumers and the media. Many B Corps called out that being a B Corp has led to new publicity and media opportunities as well as speaking engagements.

Attract and retain talent
Attracting and retaining good employees is a commonly cited benefit among B Corps. More and more of the workforce makes decisions about where to work, based on the positive impact their work creates and how well an employer treats its team. Simply put: potential employees seek out employers that reflect their values and want to work for companies where profit and purpose go hand in hand. This social capital has proven to be an invaluable perk that comes with B Corp certification.

Protecting mission
One of the benefits that B Corps often refer to is the fact that the company is thus built on a solid legal foundation for the long term. The B Corp legal framework bakes sustainability into the DNA of a company through its articles of association and as such helps protect the company’s mission through capital raises and leadership changes and gives more flexibility when evaluating potential sale and liquidity options.

Are there any advantages for a company to opt for B-Corp certification as opposed to accreditation by another standards organisation such as Global Reporting Initiative for example?

The B Impact Assessment is a free, online tool that is standardized (i.e. comparable), holistic, comprehensive, and a positive assessment of a whole business. That in itself makes it unique. There are 78 versions, based on geography, size and sector. It covers not just policies and procedures of an organization but also its outputs and outcomes. The B Impact assessment builds upon and integrates the important work that other standard organizations and industry groups are doing to define and measure impact.

How the B Impact assessment compares to GRI or IRIS?

In general, the B Impact Assessment provides a judgment (via an objective, comprehensive rating) on how significant a company’s current impact is. The B Impact Assessment is commonly confused with reporting systems or definition frameworks that detail how a company should go about collecting that impact data, but not necessarily provide a judgment on how significant that company’s impact is. For example, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) or IRIS are platforms that are likely to define specific way to report impact metrics; as an example, they may define how to best report a company's carbon emissions, so that all carbon reports in the future can be easily comparable to each other.

As a result, a GRI or IRIS indicator is more likely to tell you that the company is reporting its emissions according to best practice. On the other hand, the B Impact Assessment aims to evaluate whether the company has either increased or decreased its emissions relative to the company’s revenues or relative to the practices of other businesses, because this distinction helps a growing number of consumers, investors, and institutions who want to support businesses who put their values into action. IRIS and GRI definitions and reporting standards are a critical part of the B Impact Assessment.

What are the main challenges for B Lab in the assessment process of a company?

One of the main challenges of the assessment process is that it is a balancing act. On the one hand balancing the educational aspect of our standards and verification process, which are designed to inform a company about the many different ways they could use their business as a force for good while on the other hand creating a mechanism to formally confirm a company's performance.

In addition, there is the need for comparability, clarity, and standardization for companies which competes with the need to understand and evaluate a particular company's performance with nuance that reflects the particular sector, size and country specific context in which they operate.

From a process point of view, it’s noteworthy that while the early success of the B Corp movement has been driven largely by innovative, small and mid-sized companies, in recent years we’ve seen a growing interest from multinational and publicly-traded companies in Europe. This is good news because we need an inclusive movement from family farms to the Fortune 500. At the same time, this pushed us to develop new processes and structures to cater to the reality of companies of this size and scope.

In addition, with this exponential interest we have faced some capacity challenges for our standards analyst team, which have led to certification queues where we had to manage expectations well and ask companies to wait patiently for their turn. Of course we are excited to see the growing interest in B Corp certification, and at the same time we want to maintain the quality and accuracy of the process to ensure the credibility and value of the B Corp brand and its high standards.

Does the B Corp certification process include assessment and auditing of a company’s subsidiaries and supply chain?

To start with the first question on subsidiaries, the B Corp Certification is designed to assess a company across the entire scope of its operations.

Companies pursuing Certification that own subsidiaries must include all wholly or majority-owned subsidiaries in the Certification process. Parent companies are not eligible for Certification unless these subsidiary entities are included in their certification process, in one of two ways.

One way is to certify separately. This means that each operationally independent subsidiary can take their own B Impact Assessment and have their own public profile page on our website if certified. Examples include New Chapter (Procter & Gamble), Athleta (Gap), Innocent Drinks (The Coca-Cola Company), Ben & Jerry’s (Unilever). The parent company can only certify once all subsidiary entities have achieved the B Corp Certification, or are included in the scope of the parent company’s B Impact Assessment. A good example is the global Danone organization, the CEO Emanuel Faber has publicly announced the company’s goal for full B Corp certification. This entails certification of all business units separately.

The other option is to certify together. In this case, the company would have a single Certification with only one profile listing on bcorporation.net. The company’s structure will determine how many B Impact Assessments are necessary.

Regarding the second question on supply chain, questions about a company’s supply chain policies & practices are included as part of the B Impact assessment. Even though these questions vary based on a company’s size, sector, and geographic market, for larger companies there are questions about traceability and management that look back all the way to raw material suppliers.

In addition to the above, all companies pursuing B Corp Certification are required to complete the Disclosure Questionnaire (DQ), in which a company discloses to B Lab any sensitive industries, practices, fines, and sanctions related to the company or its partners. The DQ explicitly asks about industries with a high risk for human rights violations, as well as any practices or outcomes in a company’s supply chain that have resulted in negative impacts regarding human rights, labor conditions, or local community impact. To supplement this DQ, B Lab conducts its own Due Diligence process as explained before.

Some B Corps are going even one step further by using the B Impact Assessment to benchmark their key suppliers. The assessment’s comprehensive, rigorous and comparable metrics and the aggregated data set help these companies better understand both the overall impact of their supply chains and the individual performance of their various suppliers. This approach helps guiding their procurement and sourcing decision making processes.

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Could an oil company or a tobacco company or a business that participates in tax avoidance schemes achieve B Corp certification? If so how would that reconcile with B Lab’s core considerations for people, planet and “business as a force for good”? And if not, then where does B Lab draw the line and how is that decision arrived at?

Our Theory of Change is that any company that is committed to creating social and environmental impact, whatever their previous activities, can consider certification. In the case of an oil company B Lab would assess whether the organization has already put in place an alternative which creates a positive impact on the planet, such as substituting renewable energy sources for its fossil fuels. B Lab will be considering how significant this is in its entire business operations, the extent to which this transition has already taken place, and whether the culture and processes are in place to ensure that this direction of travel is maintained and enhanced. We would not expect such a transition to happen quickly but it would be a journey we would welcome any company to go on.

The B Impact Assessment enables a business to measure and manage its environmental and social performance and impact. The assessment and review process delves even further using the Disclosure Questionnaire and our own Due Diligence process. Companies must complete a Disclosure Questionnaire to identify potentially sensitive issues related to the company (e.g. historical fines, sanctions, material litigation, or sensitive industry practices). Part of disclosure questions is type of industry asking about tobacco, oil, gambling etc.

To supplement this Disclosure Questionnaire, B Lab has its own Due Diligence process and conducts background checks and has a public complaint mechanism to flag these potential negative impacts. Any issues flagged through any of these mechanisms are reviewed independently of a company’s positive impact score and can result in additional transparency requirements, remediation requirements, or ineligibility for the certification. All of this is overseen by B Lab’s independent Standards Advisory Council.

What is the difference between a B Corp certified company and a Benefit Corporation? What are the legal implications of each and what is the trajectory of Benefit Corporations as a legal status in Europe?

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Certified B Corps and Benefit Corporations are often confused. They share much in common and are complementary, but have a few important differences. Companies that pursue either denomination make a commitment to consider the impact of all stakeholders not just shareholders, and they must publicly disclose social and environmental metrics. Certified B Corp is the term used for any for-profit entity that is certified by B Lab, based on a company's verified performance on the B Impact Assessment and fulfilling the legal requirements in its articles of association.

By contrast, the Benefit corporation is an innovative corporate legal form for a business, like an LLC for example, but with legally protected requirements of higher purpose, accountability, and transparency. This type of corporation is currently recognized in 38 states across the US. Benefit corporations are legally empowered to pursue positive stakeholder impact alongside profit. While many Benefit corporations use the B Impact Assessment to create a free benefit report, Benefit corporations do not need to reach a particular score, nor have their performance verified or audited by B Lab, or anyone else. B Lab promotes mission-aligned legal structures like the Benefit corporation that join the interests of business with those of society. B Lab collaborates with businesses, the capital markets, and policy makers to drive adoption of these structures around the world.

Building on the success of Benefit corporation legislation in the US, B Lab is already working with governments in several countries to create and implement mission-aligned structures and working in all its regions to promote their use. Italy, Ecuador, Colombia and the Canadian province of British Columbia and 38 jurisdictions in the United States (including Puerto Rico) have passed legislation to enact the Benefit Corporation legislation and efforts are moving forward also in Argentina, Chile, Peru and many other countries and regions. More than 10,000 companies around the world now have this type of corporate structure.

Is B Lab working with government and inter-governmental organisations to drive change at a legislative level? If so what are some of the initiatives and successes that B Lab has been involved in?

The B Corp movement is coming at a time of a great lack of trust in business generally. Many people don’t believe that the existing economic system is working for them. That’s why we’re working with an ecosystem of B Corps and leaders across all sectors of society to build a so called “B Economy” that works for everyone, for the long term. Governments and intergovernmental organisations are pivotal in the societal changes that are so much needed and we seek collaboration via the different levels of our organization, from B Lab global to B Lab Europe, to the local country level and the B Corp community. We have achieved clear results by the adoption of the Benefit Corporation legislation in multiple countries and are exploring pathways to promote these and similar governance structures in markets where we see fit. But our work with governments and intergovernmental bodies is not only on the legislative level.

Exemplary for this is the collaboration between B Lab Global and the UN Global compact which resulted in a new tool, the SDG action manager: a web-based impact management solution to enable businesses to measure progress and take action on the Sustainable Development Goals through 2030.

Any closing thoughts?

The global B Corp movement is on a mission to demonstrate that the future of capitalism lies in creating an equitable and inclusive form of prosperity and resilience in line with society’s and our planet’s boundaries and needs. Although progress has been made by the business community over the last decade, we have way more work to do. This vision on systems change calls not only for innovation and courage, but also for empathy and creativity, for wisdom and the ability to listen, and most of all to move beyond just words and root our beliefs in impactful action. This also means working with our unlikely allies, spending time with our critical friends and making space for the voices unheard of.

The B Corp movement will continue to challenge the status quo of mainstream economic thinking and pursue the transition from “shareholder primacy” to a model which includes all stakeholders in society. No one ever said that systems change would be easy, but it’s possible and I’m confident that in our togetherness we’ll find our way.

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About Fusion Associates

Since 1998, Fusion Associates has been placing experienced professionals across the globe within consumer markets including consumer goods, fashion, sporting goods, healthy living and luxury.

Environmental, humanitarian, social and political concerns are close to the Partners both in and out of the business. We pride ourselves in partnering with industry leaders who wish to contribute to a better, more sustainable future. Working with global companies that are at the forefront of innovating and integrating sustainability into the heart of their business, we have helped build purpose-led teams from leadership to subject experts in biodiversity and animal welfare. 

Fusion is a purpose-led search firm awaiting its own B-Corp certification.