This way forward - what being a B Corp means to LAS

By Tess Robinson

March is always B Corp Month, it’s a chance for all us B Corp’s to collectively reflect on what being part of this movement means to us and how we can go the extra mile in living it out in our businesses.

It's rightfully HARD to get certified and once you’ve made the grade, there’s no stopping. You need to be fully committed to a journey of improvement and acknowledge that there’s always more that can be done.?

For those who aren’t sure what a B Corp is, we are companies who adopt a more systems-thinking approach to business, prioritising people and planet alongside profit. We work towards a fairer, more equitable, more sustainable way of doing business. There’s always been an underlying belief in business that purpose and profit are mutually exclusive, but it doesn't need to be that way, as thousands of thriving B Corps, including a fair few in the learning technologies industry, prove every day.?

Being purpose-led plays out in many different ways in a business like ours. At the moment, particularly in our industry, gen-AI is all the rage. Everyone is very excited about the possibilities but, as far as we can tell, very few are considering the social and environmental impact - and both are huge.?

When we look at the use of gen-AI in LAS work, we carefully consider these aspects on an equal footing to the functional or commercial benefits and approve (or don’t approve) tools for use on this basis.?

We also try to drive awareness of the lesser-discussed impacts of gen-AI in our industry, encouraging debate and sharing information, so that others might consider taking the wider context into account too and shape their responses to gen-AI accordingly.?

Nothing in business is neutral and no business is entirely without negative impact. Being a B Corp is not about being perfect, it’s about trying to do the right thing and committing to accountability, transparency and continuous improvement. What customer wouldn't want to see the organisation they're buying products or services off doing that?

Everything we do in every business is connected to our natural environment and to the people within it, even if those connections are sometimes hard to see. Being purpose-led often means that decisions are not as straightforward as they would be for a standard business, but we firmly believe that operating in this way is the right thing to do. And this way of doing business is only going to gain traction, as evidenced in the sheer number of companies who have become B Corps in the last couple of years. When we certified there were just a few hundred B Corps in the UK. Now we number 1,500 - an increase of more than 50% in less than a year. As the saying goes ‘without a liveable planet there is no business’, so maybe it’s time all businesses started thinking more broadly.