The New Standards Ask More. One System Holds Them Together. Here’s How Our TrailBlazers Navigated It.

For years, B Corp™ Certification came down to a single threshold: a company was assessed across every impact area and had to clear 80 points, with every certified company’s score published on the B Corp directory for anyone to read. Reaching 80 was demanding work, and it measured a real commitment.  

The B Lab™ standards v2 keep that holistic view, but make one change: every impact topic now carries baseline requirements, each with its own policies, procedures, targets, and required oversight from a company’s highest governing body. 

As Rebecca Coffey of Impact Growth Partners (IGP), the consultancy that guided the TrailBlazers cohort, described it, the standards “move away from the points-based model towards mandatory baseline requirements paired with materiality-driven improvements.” Every aspiring B Corp must meet universal baseline requirements, with variations based on the company’s size, industry, and sector.

While this change may result in more work and the need for greater oversight, it also means that impact can be consistently achieved across multiple areas of concern, from sustainability to human rights and beyond. As an added benefit, the work that goes into compliance can pay off in a very real way: companies that achieve certification will have built infrastructure and job roles that collectively make impact measurable, consistently achievable, and deeply embedded in the company’s actual operating model.

More Structure for More Control Over Ultimate Impact

Under the B Lab standards v2, maintaining B Corp Certification — across the five-year cycle and beyond — depends on the creation of management systems and governing structures that can sustain a company’s impact over time. 

Meeting a baseline in every topic asks more of a company than the older get-past-the-post system, and every certifying company must meet the same baselines. 

Across the fourteen companies IGP worked with, the firm found that “the new standards are achievable and do not require fundamental changes to business models.” The B Lab standards v2 build on the impact work of companies currently in compliance while requiring more governance, supervision, and oversight. A company now has to account for its most material impacts on people and the planet, assess them honestly, and show how those impacts are managed towards deliberate ends. 

Material impacts are the ones most significant to a particular business. For a homebuilder, that could be the environmental footprint of the raw materials it uses. For a global manufacturer, the carbon emissions and labor conditions running through its supply chain. 

Read as a list, the requirements multiply quickly, and the apparent volume can seem overwhelming on first analysis. But what companies have recognized, including our TrailBlazers, is that they only need to have systems and strategies in place to manage compliance across the seven impact topic areas. 

What companies need, in other words, is structure — the proper structure to support consistent progress towards their various standards-led goals. The Sustainability Management System is one highly effective method for achieving that structure.

The Sustainability Management System: Instant Impact Structure Across Three Simple Elements

The Sustainability Management System is how B Lab describes a company with three elements working together across every impact topic: 

1. Clear accountability, often traceable up to the highest governing body
2. Defined goals with measurable action plans
3. Documented policies and procedures

These are the basic contours of a company that takes its impact seriously and wants results to be owned by the people with actual power to effect change. Establishing these three elements also positions companies to make incremental progress along a defined strategy, creating performance improvement expectations similar to those that would apply to a department like marketing or sales.

As IGP’s Sonia Tze Huse described it, a documented system with top-level buy-in keeps sustainability practices and other impact priorities “embedded into the organization” so they don’t become “one-off initiatives” that a company forgets “the day after the audit.” 

Creating a structure that’s capable of meeting the three bare minimum elements listed above can also make staying compliant across the standards second nature — and vice-versa. As Rebecca Coffey put it, meet the requirements in each topic, “and then you’ll have a sustainability management system!” 

The Three Elements of the Sustainability Management System (SMS)

The work required by the standards is not just completed for certification. Rather, it becomes part of how the company sets priorities, makes decisions, and tracks its impact over time. It also enables quicker, more transparent views and decision-making when it comes to the actual impacts a company produces.

SMS element #1, accountability, starts with assigning an owner to each requirement and giving the highest governing body responsibility for key policies and decisions. 

IGP found that many companies had already brought social and environmental issues to their boards, typically as broad oversight items. The standards V2 work at a finer grain: the governing body has to formally review and approve many of the company’s most material policies, and take responsibility for stakeholder engagement itself, so that what workers, suppliers, and communities say arrives before the decisions that affect them get made. The governing body then answers to those stakeholders for the company’s impacts on them.

SMS element #2 asks that companies set measurable goals for their material impacts. A company that has just measured its supply-chain emissions, for instance, should set a reduction target against that baseline, and name an owner. This is “materiality-driven improvements” in practice: because a company builds the targets around its own largest impacts, they’re specific to its business rather than a universal checklist.

SMS element #3 requires companies to formalize their management of social and environmental impacts through documented policies and procedures. Rather than relying on informal practices or individual knowledge, companies must put their approach in writing, creating clear and consistent processes for setting impact goals, implementing them, and managing the activities that support those goals. Documentation also helps embed impact management within the organization, ensuring practices are maintained over time, even as teams and leadership change. 

Under this model, companies participating in the TrailBlazers program began to see requirements connecting to pull together personnel and work that might otherwise sit in separate parts of the business. For example, climate targets owned by sustainability, worker goals managed by HR, supplier practices overseen by procurement, and stakeholder engagement led by different teams were all being brought into one board packet or one executive leadership team meeting.

Build Systems Capability to Make Impact Not Just Achievable But Automatic

For companies approaching the new standards, building an explicit Sustainability Management System is not required. But putting in the work gives companies more control and consistency for the results they achieve.

Done well, it’s the infrastructure that makes the rest of the standards more manageable, more connected, and ultimately more meaningful. It gives companies a way to bring work happening across different impact topics and teams into a common system, one with clear goals, accountability, processes for measuring progress, and regular opportunities to evaluate what is working and what needs to change. 

Rather than treating each requirement as a separate exercise, the SMS helps companies build the structures needed to manage their impact as an ongoing part of their operations. And while meeting the new standards will require more from companies, a strong SMS can help make that work more coordinated, durable, and useful well beyond certification.

You can use the B Impact Assessment to see what an SMS might look like for your own company based on how the standards apply to a company of your specifications. Log in to work through the requirements for your size, sector, and region, and to start seeing how the three elements of an SMS might naturally fit into place, topic by topic.