Bee for B Corp... and Benefits

B Corp is the name; but what does it mean? Well for a start it’s partly about putting people over profits. 

When Pete and Steve founded Gibe, they aimed to create an environment they could be proud of—one where they themselves would want to work. While many companies claim this, I genuinely believe it's true for Gibe.

Gibe is a positive workplace with a great atmosphere and culture, competitive pay, generous holiday allowances, and meaningful work. The company embraces diversity and doesn't discriminate (I belong to several minority groups myself).

Though we haven't always gotten everything right, we're committed to listening and improving. We have daily stand-ups, retrospectives, one-on-ones, annual reviews, surveys, and social events. The owners and the rest of the team are always eager to implement positive changes. We ask not just, "How's the work going?" but also, "How are you?"

B Corp certification has sharpened our focus on these values. We were already doing many great things, and in some cases, it was just about documenting our practices. Other areas required some refinement or modernisation.

Additionally, we've introduced new benefits:

• We’ve made significant improvements to our employee handbook, ensuring all our policies exist, are up-to-date, legally compliant, and exceed the minimum standards to be fair and supportive.
• We have reviewed our policies to cover not only the current needs of our team but also to anticipate and support future situations.
• We’ve expanded our team data gathering. We’ve been asking the team about happiness, well-being, ideas for improvement, things they hate, need, want, etc for years and this has yielded positive change. We’ve now extended our gathering to track additional measures that ensure we remain inclusive, environmentally and socially responsible. This data ensures we’re able to check ourselves and to make sure we have ideas to ensure we’re improving..
• We’re now tracking our impact on the planet by measuring our waste, electricity, gas, water, etc consumption - it’s a little mad, with so many working from home we have to do things like work out our average individual waste usage which involves comically holding bin bags on weighing scales and working out differences to get the weight of the rubbish… but it’s all for a good cause. 
• We intend to work towards positively reducing our waste and emissions, ideally net zero. This is a challenge, but by measuring our impact and providing ideas, advice, and training, we can drive positive change. We now have guides on how to reduce and have started where possible using suppliers that are more sustainable. This can be tricky, but for example, we’ve replaced most of our laptops with Framework ones - these have replaceable parts so if something fails you can replace the part and not have to scrap the whole machine which is cheaper and better for the planet in the long run.
• We’ve introduced Dental and Health Cover alongside Life insurance. This covers our team, and can optionally be extended to cover family. It doesn’t matter if you’re full or part-time - as long as you’ve passed your probation you’ll be covered. 
• We are actively offsetting our carbon footprint by funding tree planting and green projects through Ecologi. Learn more at https://ecologi.com/gibedigital.
• We already did some charity work, normally the fairly informal “sponsored run” type of thing. We’ve supercharged this now, with people empowered to organise and run regular campaigns and activities. Our charity efforts primarily focus on fundraising for local charities in Bristol and the South-West, where we believe the money will do the most good.
• We’ve become recognised as a Living Wage employer. An easy one given we have always paid the team generously.
• We’ve started to look at our suppliers and clients; most of whom share our values and are looking towards positive change already. We have already switched to ethical suppliers where this was a quick win and are actively looking into alternatives where it’s a little bit harder - for example, finding a bank that doesn’t invest in digging up and burning dinosaurs (what normal people call fossil fuels ;-) ) is hard.

We’re designing training and looking into how we can more deeply integrate the B Corp ideologies into our day-to-day. We don’t want caring for people and planet to be a badge, rather something that is core to what we do everyday. 

Examples of what were already doing

• Remote work and flexible working hours including for part-time
• Above-average holiday allowance and further enhance it by closing our offices for two weeks at the end of the year. Additionally, we usually provide an annual trip, fully paid, where our team can spend time together, talking about ideas and exploring different cultures in cities like Rome, Paris, Dublin, and Prague.
• Pension and competitive pay packages
• Generous and flexible maternity and paternity packages.
• We provide extensive training and support for attending conferences, including expenses-paid trips abroad.
• Comprehensive health care policies to help staff and their families when they are unwell, softening the impact of the healthcare crisis in the UK.
• And more

We firmly believe that the quality of our work is directly linked to the happiness and fairness with which we treat our team. But it’s not even just about the work; we believe that it’s good to be good. That is why it’s important to us to make a difference by looking after our people, our community and our planet.