B Corp certification is going through a bit of a reckoning. A few certified companies have walked away from it recently, calling it little more than a marketing badge. Regulators across the EU are now asking businesses to back up sustainability claims with real evidence, not just a logo on a website.
We think that’s healthy, if you’re doing the work for the right reasons.
For us, B Corp has always been about the framework. A set of practical standards we used to build the business we actually wanted to run. Over 30 other certified B Corps now work alongside us across our spaces, and they came looking for the same thing.
If you’re not familiar, here’s the short version. A Certified B Corporation is a for-profit company independently checked by B Lab, a nonprofit, against rigorous standards for how it treats its people and the wider world it operates in, alongside how it performs financially. It’s a certification, not a legal structure or tax status, closer in spirit to LEED for buildings or Fair Trade for supply chains, a verified signal that a business is genuinely measuring its impact.
Certification isn’t a one-off, either. Companies have to legally commit to weighing up all stakeholders, not just shareholders, in their governing documents, and they’re required to recertify on a rolling basis to keep the badge.
It started in 2019 as a reflection exercise. We sat down with our CEO Paul Dutnall and Head of Operations Ana Bernardo as part of B Corp Month this year to talk through how it’s shaped the business since. As Paul says, we were asking ourselves what we stood for as a business, and B Corp felt aligned with our values – community, fairness, responsibility. Ana points out that what began as part of a brand exercise quickly became something bigger. We certified in 2022, and recertifying every three years forces you to keep improving. The real work was embedding those values into systems, decision-making, and daily operations, not just stating them.
Our latest B Impact Assessment score is 98.7, up from 83.2 when we first certified. That progress reflects a real collective effort across the business. Our strongest categories are Workers, Community and Governance, and that makes sense. Those are the areas we’ve consistently invested energy into, from supporting our own team to showing up in the neighbourhoods our spaces sit in. Concretely, that means we’re a London Living Wage employer, we invest in team benefits and development, and we’re building out our Net Zero strategy.
As Paul puts it, the score matters, but what matters more is how you get there. It reflects habits and accountability built up over years, not a single test you can cram for.
If you’re reading this in 2026, the B Corp badge you’re looking at today means something different from the one we certified against in 2022. The bar is a lot higher.
In April 2025, B Lab launched the biggest overhaul of the B Corp standards in its history. The old system let companies hit an overall score of 80 out of 200, meaning strong performance in one area, say environment, could paper over weak performance somewhere else, like governance. Critics called it a loophole. From 2026, that loophole is gone.
Under the new Version 2.1 standards, companies must now meet a minimum bar across all nine mandatory Impact Topics independently:
Cherry-picking your strong suit is no longer an option.
Verification has also changed hands. Independent third-party audits, run to ISO 17021-1 standards, have replaced self-assessment. Certification is no longer a point-in-time achievement either. Companies must show measurable progress at Year 3 and Year 5 of a five-year cycle, with the bar rising each time.
We’ve been preparing for our next recertification against these new criteria for the past two years. If anything, we’re glad the standard is getting harder to meet. It keeps recertification meaningful instead of routine.
Here’s the part of the B Corp story that doesn’t show up on a certificate.
Across our London, Manchester and Reading spaces, we’re now home to over 30 B Corps. Values-driven companies have actively sought each other out here, and it’s changed the texture of our spaces in ways we didn’t fully anticipate when we started.
When your neighbours are also measuring their carbon footprint and paying a living wage, it changes what feels normal. Choices that might look like extra effort elsewhere start to feel like the obvious way to run things. Collaboration happens without anyone forcing it too, shared values turn out to be a good foundation for partnerships, and a few of our B Corp members now work together on projects that started as a conversation in a kitchen or at a member social. And when everyone around you is measuring and improving, the whole community holds itself to a higher bar.
We’ve tried to build real infrastructure around this rather than leaving it to chance. We run peer support groups specifically for our B Corp members, where they compare notes on their own recertification process and swap ideas for impact initiatives that are actually landing with their teams. We also run panel discussions during B Corp Month each year. And because so many of our members are on their own impact journeys, we’ve built a data-sharing system that shows each member their individual share of utilities and carbon footprint, based on their space, so their sustainability reporting has real numbers behind it rather than guesswork.
As Ana puts it, participation is what makes this work. If teams and members aren’t involved, it doesn’t stick. That’s why we run practical engagement initiatives, like recycling competitions and space-level challenges, so impact feels visible and tangible rather than something that only happens at head office.
Paul adds that members hold us accountable too. They ask for transparency and data, and that pushes us to improve. It’s a two-way pressure that keeps sustainability alive rather than letting it slide once the badge is on the wall.
If you’re a purpose-led business shopping for office space, a B Corp badge on a landlord’s website is worth paying attention to. Under the new 2026 standards especially, the credibility behind it is real. Third-party verified rather than self-reported, so the greenwashing risk is mostly gone. You’re also moving in alongside businesses who’ve already done the work of lining up their values with how they operate, which counts for a lot when you’re picking who you share a building with. And whoever’s renting you the space has made a legal commitment to weigh your interests, and the planet’s, against their own bottom line.
That’s the whole point of the certification, as far as we’re concerned. Or as Paul and Ana put it themselves, at Work.Life, B Corp isn’t a label, it’s a lens, and it continues to shape how the business grows, operates, and serves its community every day.
Work.Life has been a Certified B Corporation since 2022, scoring 98.7 on the B Impact Assessment. We’re currently preparing for recertification under B Lab’s new Version 2.1 standards.
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