We’ve made progress across all areas of B Corp, but there’s still plenty more to do

Governance

What we said we’d do

What we did

Improving our recruitment processes

https://www.williamjoseph.co.uk/impact-case-studies/reducing-the-power-imbalance-in-our-recruitment-processes

Last year our recruitment process evolved significantly to ensure that we were reducing unconscious bias and in turn attract people with different backgrounds to join William Joseph.

Our aim was to have people with new perspectives join the team, hire specialist roles through a similar process and start a formal design internship programme to help people from different backgrounds join the industry.

In 2022 we hired four people into the William Joseph team. Yas, Lori, Lucy and Adell. We are proud that they each bring a fresh perspective to the group and represent a change to the white men that make up much of our industry.

Yas gave some particularly encouraging feedback at the end of the year:

“Before I started talking to you all about joining the team, I was totally lost. I knew that I wanted to be a working mum, that I wanted to work part-time, to use my skills and experience, and to have a life that wasn’t defined by work but where work could still be one of the defining areas of my life. I began to wonder if it was even possible to be a working parent on my own terms. Thank you so much for confounding this and giving me the chance to do what I love, in the way that works for me.”

Our vision

William Joseph’s vision has been a discussion with the team for as long as any of us can remember. At times it has felt like it’s on the tip of our tongue - close to being defined but never quite having the words to articulate it.

Working with our team we wanted to finally nail down what our mission is and how the team can go about helping to achieve it.

At the beginning of 2022 we started to use the strapline Equity by Design. This symbolises what the team believes William Joseph to be about - creating more inclusive products, services and brands. Because we only work with those organisations making a positive change in the world, these accessible solutions help create a more equal and fair society.

We have defined a 3 year vision with a range of elements to help people see how they can contribute. Our team’s objectives, measures and personal development plans are now based around this vision - aligning everyone’s efforts.

The areas we have focussed our vision on include:


  1. Brand and positioning

  2. Clients

  3. New business

  4. People and culture

  5. Products and services

  6. Innovation/scalability

  7. Platforms: Technology and community

  8. Processes and systems

  9. Planet

  10. Commercials

Social & Environmental Performance tracking

We have always worked with organisations who are improving the world. In the last few years we have become better at defining what exactly that means for us.

The next step this year was to measure how effectively we were meeting our social goals over the course of the year, using the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) framework.

In addition, we wanted to get better at monitoring our own environmental impact, especially as we switch to remote working.

You can see more about where we were in our case study on remote working from 2021: https://www.williamjoseph.co.uk/impact-case-studies/remote-first

We are now able to see across the year, how we are tracking against the different UN SDGs. Whenever a new job is completed we plot the impact it will have and how we can measure it.

The aim is to allow us to focus our efforts to work with clients in areas where we are not currently impacting against.

This has allowed us to cover a wider range of different SDGs in our work. In fact we have had 42% more impact compared to the year before. However the areas which we are having a low impact against remain unchanged - specifically the goals relating to climate and the environment.

You can see more detail here:

https://www.williamjoseph.co.uk/impact-case-studies/ongoing-monitoring-of-our-un-sdgs-impact

To reduce our carbon footprint, we have been proactively calculating the carbon that we emit as a team for the year. This is currently around 10–12,000kg - a significant improvement on the 30,000kg we were emitting when office based.

See more detail here:

https://www.williamjoseph.co.uk/impact-case-studies/carbon-accounting

Financial performance

If everyone has the same information, more equitable conversations can be had - and ultimately better decisions to be made.

A notable gap in this area was our discussion of financial information. Many people in the team had individual sight of specific project budgets and costs, but only a small number saw the full financial performance of the team on a regular basis. We would do end of year updates for everyone, but without ongoing context these were always a bit tricky to understand.

We wanted to change this.

We have now created a Financial Dashboard which everyone can access and that is broadcast with commentary once a month.

The dashboard includes:

  • Gross profit – confirmed

  • Gross profit – projected

  • Gross profit per person

  • Gross profit v people costs %

  • Gross profit %

  • Overhead cover (months)

  • Client concentration


These metrics give a picture of how we are performing financially - and combines with how people are being rewarded. Of particular note is Gross profit v people costs % - which shows if the team is being pushed too hard or the balance between renumeration and company profit is disproportionate.

This shows everyone in the team the reality of our situation which means better conversations can be had when discussing topics such as costs, investments and salaries.

Find our more detail here:

https://www.williamjoseph.co.uk/impact-case-studies/building-understanding-of-the-teams-finances

Onboarding


By switching to remote working, we have discovered that a significant gap in our process was ‘onboarding’ of new people into the team.

Onboarding is accessibility - when bringing people into any team, it’s crucial to help them feel a part of the group from day one. This starts with practical things like making sure people have got the correct IT kit on time and all the right meetings in their diaries.

https://www.williamjoseph.co.uk/impact-case-studies/remote-first

As well as practicalities it’s also important to help people understand the more abstract cultural aspects of the team - ‘what it’s ok to assume’ according to Schein [https://think-boundless.com/ed…]

All of these steps add up to making your team more accessible - especially if people are joining with different experiences or backgrounds. We’re working hard to improve this process so everyone who joins our team feels welcome right away.

We have had four people join the team this year - and all have commented on how quickly they felt up to speed. Including Lori:

“Your perfect job exists, so don’t stop looking.

This week my probation as a front-end developer at William Joseph (B Corp) ended. I’ve got my dream job and it’s at a company that’s so supportive that it sounds like I’ve made it up.

I also went to my first face-to-face Women In Tech, Nottingham, meetup. I joined the virtual events during the pandemic and without this network, I don’t think I would have applied for a job at a London agency. I was worried that I wasn’t a proper developer. And I was worried about giving up design at the age of 38. It was also very unlike me to leave a job after just a year. But sometimes you have to take a chance.

Try to ignore the stereotypes and what you’ve been told that you should do.”

You can see more about the specifics of our process here:

https://www.williamjoseph.co.uk/impact-case-studies/improving-our-flexible-ways-of-working

Create a more equal and transparent organisation


We have always wanted people from across the team to contribute to decisions. This is important from an ethical standpoint - if someone is in a team they have a right to help determine its direction. It also ensures you make better decisions by using a diverse range of perspectives.

When William Joseph was a smaller group, we could rely on psychological safety to enable this. But with a wider variety of roles, experiences and personalities we need a more robust process to make sure this happens effectively.

As such, we have been testing the ‘consent based decision making’ process from Sociocracy to allow us to do this.

It is a process that leaders can put in place to enable a wide range of views to contribute to a decision. The aim is to focus on consent rather than agreement. The underlying process relies on asking if anyone has a critical concern about moving forward, rather than aiming for everyone to agree.

We are using this to explore the overlap of tolerances in our team, rather than working to full agreement. The process makes it much easier to move forward, whilst involving everyone.

It still relies on having trust between people to enable them to share their full thoughts - but works to reduce the bar at which people feel safe to do so.

You can see more about how we’re doing this here:

https://www.williamjoseph.co.uk/impact-case-studies/making-better-more-equitable-decisions-with-sociocracy

Plans for next year:

Writing a formal mission statement including:

  • A commitment to a specific positive social impact

  • A commitment to a specific positive environmental impact

  • A commitment to serve a target beneficiary group in need

Building a formal onboarding process for new employees

We want this activity to do more than simply explain how we do things - it should focus on why certain choices are made and the culture that we’re trying to create.

Implementing Sociocracy circles

As we grow our team, we want to ensure decisions are made equitably - with the ability for a wide range of perspectives to feed into them. We believe that sociocracy is the method for making this happen at scale - and are focusing on how to create various ‘circles’ that deploy this way of working across the team.

Workers

What we said we’d do

What we did

William Joseph Handbook


As the team’s numbers have grown, we have been less able to rely on everyone “just knowing” how things work. Maybe we never should have done this, but since more people have joined the team it’s become clear it’s not inclusive, dangerous and unhealthy for people.

As such, we created our first company handbook to bring together a set of policies so everyone knows the most important information.

You can see more about what the handbook includes here:

https://www.williamjoseph.co.uk/impact-case-studies/building-our-first-company-handbook

This year we wanted to make this information fully accessible to the whole team - so they didn’t have to ask where to find any policy. The aim was also to give more clarity on specific areas including Bonuses and giving clear pay scales and progression plans for everyone.

The Handbook has been delivered & distributed to the team through our Charlie HR platform. It now plays a significant role in our onboarding process - helping to make the team accessible to all from their very first day.

We have not made a significant impact on our bonuses and pay scales. We have become clearer on how and when bonuses will be paid - but still want to provide more detail for team members about what they can expect and the factors that impact the amount. Our aim is to move this towards a profit share scheme where multiple people help decide what level should be paid to the group - balancing personal and business perspectives.

Everyone on the team now has objectives & measures which they can demonstrate how they are adding value to the group. This has provided much needed clarity for everyone involved.

We are yet to link this to a standardised mechanism of progressing peoples’ pay. This is a focus for next year.

Remote working


In 2021 we decided that by switching to a remote-first model, we wanted to increase the number of people and diversity of perspectives that can be a part of our team. In turn we hoped this will improve the quality and inclusiveness of the solutions we create for clients.

The key areas we wanted to improve after this change included:

Remote working mental health

Work out how best to use office / 3D space

Understand the climate impact of remote-working tools

You can see more about our initial progress and plans in 2021 here: https://www.williamjoseph.co.uk/impact-case-studies/remote-first

At William Joseph, we want to create a culture which trusts people to know what way of working works best for them. Our aim is to place this trust at the heart of our processes as we continue to grow, to create somewhere that people can do their best work and have balance to their life.

We are starting to create a routine about when and how we come together to do this. By meeting in person 4 times a year, people can plan their time around these sessions. Two of these sessions are overnight retreats and two take place in London - still the easiest place for everyone to reach. As our team grows and develops, smaller meetups are taking place all over the country and we are developing what we talk about when we meet on screen.

https://www.williamjoseph.co.uk/impact-case-studies/improving-our-flexible-ways-of-working

To support people with their mental health, we use Spill to provide therapy sessions, manager mental health training, and regular feelings check-ins — embedded into our Slack setup. Our aim is to provide people with the professional support they need to have a balanced, enjoyable and healthy relationship with work.

Normalising these discussions about mental health means that our team are better able to support each other when things get tough - and enjoy a better overall balance to their lives at all times.

“Starting my first agency-side role a few month ago was pretty daunting. I’d heard some nightmare stories about toxicity, internal competition and overworking.
Very relieved that this isn’t the case at William Joseph (B Corp) and this isn’t by accident, but because the founders and team are aware of the challenges of agency work and take practical steps to help ease them.”

Lucy, UX & Content Strategist at William Joseph

https://www.williamjoseph.co.uk/impact-case-studies/normalising-discussions-about-mental-health

We have made progress to understand the true impact of not just our digital tools, but our entire operation on the environment.

See more details here:

https://www.williamjoseph.co.uk/impact-case-studies/carbon-accounting

We have made progress to understand the true impact of not just our digital tools, but our entire operation on the environment.
Our handbook now plays a significant role in our onboarding process - helping to make the team accessible to all from their very first day.

Plans for next year:

Regularly (at least once a year) conduct employee satisfaction or engagement surveys

We want this to be done in a people-centric way that ensures it’s not seen as being ‘checked up on’ and really understood to be the supportive mechanism that it is intended to be.

Once we have these measures, we will benchmark employee satisfaction to relevant industry benchmarks and hope to outperform on attrition and satisfaction.

Socially responsible pensions promotion through Nest

Our pension provider allows people to switch to a more ethically responsible pension fund. We want to make sure that everyone has access to this and understands how to make the switch.

Write a non-discrimination statement

This simple statement will bring to life our approach to equality in our team

Socioeconomic analysis for workforce

The social mobility commission has published detailed guidance on how to measure the social background of people. Their key question asks ‘What was the occupation of your main household earner when you were about aged 14?’. They then break down answers into three main categories:

  • Professional backgrounds

  • Intermediate backgrounds

  • Lower socio-economic backgrounds

Which allows comparison across different teams, industries and communities. This is the measure we will investigate and hopefully measures as part of our ongoing team development.

https://socialmobilityworks.org/toolkit/measurement

Pay Scales & Progression frameworks

We have always worked hard to reward people in the team fairly whilst enabling long term sustainability of the business. As we have grown this challenge has become harder - and we now need to implement a full set of transparent processes to ensure equity across different people.

Customers

What we said we’d do

What we did

We want to increase our impact on the UN SDGs that we are currently missing, specifically around climate change and environmental sustainability. We will be doing so by offering significant commercial discounts on those projects to both charities and companies who can demonstrate an impact in this area.

By better more regularly reporting on our impact we can spot opportunities and gaps sooner

When we first started looking at our impact against the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) - we simply did so once a year for our B Corp Impact Report. We have since developed this reporting to be in line with how we keep track of all our jobs and clients.

The intention is to allow us to change course more quickly, if we feel there is an area of the UN SDGs that we are not making an impact on.

We are also moving away from binary reporting against each SDG, and looking to better evidence the extent of our impact for each project.

As such, we have been able to achieve a more balanced impact against the full set of UN SDGs in 2022 than we could in 2023. This includes a 42% increase in the number of UN SDGs that we are doing significant work to impact.

You can see more detail here:

https://www.williamjoseph.co.uk/impact-case-studies/ongoing-monitoring-of-our-un-sdgs-impact

Plans for next year:

Monitor customer satisfaction & share internally within the company and publicly

We have always spent time understanding our customers by building relationships with them and our team. Whilst this continues to be our focus for ensuring satisfaction, we also want to create a process to gather satisfaction insight and data from the wide range of people we now work with. Once we have this we want to share it wider than just the people who have collected it so everyone can benefit from it.

Set specific targets for customer / client satisfaction

Having collected standardised data about satisfaction, we then want to ensure that we have specific targets across our one of project clients and those whom we have an ongoing relationship with.

Environment

What we said we’d do

What we did

Carbon calculations


In 2021 we decided that by switching to a remote-first model, we wanted to increase the number of people and diversity of perspectives that can be a part of our team. In turn we hoped this will improve the quality and inclusiveness of the solutions we create for clients.

We also wanted to better understand the climate impact of our remote-working tools and model.

We have made progress to understand the true impact of not just our digital tools, but our entire operation on the environment.

We are exploring a range of partners, who can help us to implement a carbon accounting system. A professional system would allow us to monitor our impact on a more granular level and involve the whole team in our efforts to reduce our footprint.

We are also testing micro generation for home offices with Chris - to understand the impact and cost of such systems for the wider team.

See more details here:

https://www.williamjoseph.co.uk/impact-case-studies/carbon-accounting

Website carbon emissions


Since moving to being a remote 1st company we have focussed our efforts to understanding the carbon impact of our digital tools. Hand in hand we have also been building our knowledge of building sustainable and environmentally friendly websites.

https://www.websitecarbon.com/

Many of our clients are acutely aware of the climate crisis. With the charity industry being responsible for generating significant amounts of carbon we are keen to ensure that their digital channels are as sustainable as possible.

By implementing green hosting and ensuring that our website’s development was as low bandwidth as possible we have drastically reduced many of our clients’ environmental footprint.

One example is Help Muscians who saw an 86% reduction in carbon emitted by each website visit

https://www.williamjoseph.co.uk/work/help-musicians-creating-a-world-where-musicians-thrive


Our new website for Help Musicians who saw an 86% reduction in carbon emitted by each visit

Plans for next year:

Highlight green credentials our hosting and measure the overall carbon savings on websites launched

We always use a verified green host Krystal, to deploy our clients’ websites. This combined with our modern web design and development techniques, usually delivers a significant improvement on their websites’ environmental impact.

We want to make measurement of this improvement a core part of our website delivery process and aggregate our reductions to see the full impact.

Template for 360 feedback review that includes questions on environmental and social impact

Whilst we have limited ability to impact on our own environmental outcomes, we can still promote this kind of thinking in our team. By ensuring that environmental and social impact is a key part of our feedback processes this will enable that to happen.

Community

What we said we’d do

What we did

Charity Book Club


We help to create a safe, trusting space to learn with the Charity Book Club. The group explores important topics to help people grow their own perspectives.

The aim is to get people thinking big and thinking differently. This allows people to be inspired by others and develop their own thinking, often to put into practice in the charities in which they work.

Last year we wanted to help the group to:


  • Have more diverse book choices

  • Create community growth and engagement

  • Continue their Charity support


https://www.williamjoseph.co.uk/impact-case-studies/creating-a-safe-trusting-space-to-learn-with-charity-book-club

We’re all working from home more than ever before, and although remote working brings huge benefits, it often means we miss out on connecting with people outside our immediate circle.

Four years after the book club was set up, in this new hybrid world, the group’s value is being felt more now than ever before.

The books the group read and discussed this year cover a wide range of topics including masculinity, borders, religion, the environment and the care system.

We had two in-person meetups and continued the other four events on Zoom.

79 people registered to attend events

815 followers on social media

£700 raised for charity

The charity donations are a small reduction from 2021 and a 25% reduction from 2020, due to the added costs of hiring spaces rather than running the book club on Zoom.

“It’s lovely to be able to talk books with a group of wonderful humans, and the books themselves have been a great way to learn more about different social issues.”

See more details on each of the sessions and the surprise author visitor here:

https://www.williamjoseph.co.uk/impact-case-studies/creating-a-safe-trusting-space-to-learn-with-charity-book-club-2

Collaborative Future


Having partnered with Collaborative Future in a number of initiatives, we deeply believe in their mission to make the world of work a more equal place. We formally and informally have helped to guide their positioning and communication, so that they can grow their impact and reach.

Our aim this year was to help them with:

  • Expansion of their services

  • Funding streams


https://www.williamjoseph.co.uk/impact-case-studies/helping-unemployed-young-people-with-the-collaborative-future-advisory-board

This year Collaborative Future have been able to deliver:

338 mentoring sessions

32 tailored events

29 coaching sessions

The key to their success is the direct, hands on approach. Where others spend thousands of pounds interviewing, researching and synthesising an idea to see whether it would work, Collaborative Future runs with it. This means that the impact starts from the first invested pound, and is strengthened with the continuous feedback, learning and improvement.

Collaborative Future have also focussed their offer - halting their direct support of recruitment - instead offering coaching, training and consultancy to allow people to run more of these processes themselves.

“William Joseph have taught us a great deal about the value that we bring into the world of work and continue to encourage us to recognise our work and impact directly through our Advisory Board and indirectly through collaborating on recruitment. They hold themselves to high standards as an organisation and push us to do the same for ourselves and our clients.” Collaborative Future

See more about their work and future plans here:

https://www.williamjoseph.co.uk/impact-case-stud

ies/helping-collaborative-future-make-a-difference

Product Tank


Digital product management is a generalist job field where many feel they do not have the skills to contribute when compared to specialist roles such as development or design. Product Tank helps people in this situation by providing skills, networks and inspiration.

William Joseph helps to organise, curate and deliver these events.

Our aim this year was to:

  • increase our recruitment of speakers from BAME communities

  • improve the diversity of perspectives that we hear from at the sessions

We want to improve access to product management from a wider variety of backgrounds so have pushed to ensure that speakers and organisers are more representative of these communities.

We have been particularly focused on showcasing women and those from a BAME background who are experts at their craft. Despite a large number of both being involved in the industry, it is often white men that take centre stage at these kinds of meet-ups.

We have attempted to address this without discriminating against those with interesting stories to tell. The organising team has also worked hard to reach out to different networks to find speakers with the experience people want to hear from, but with a different perspective to what they’ve heard before.

6,500 people have viewed Product Tanks across the world in 2022

54% of talks were given by women – up from 40% in 2020

37% of talks were given by people from a BAME background, up from 19% in 2021

See more details here:

https://www.williamjoseph.co.uk/impact-case-studies/supporting-people-to-find-their-way-into-product-management-with-product-tank

Agencies for Good


There are thousands of organisations that partner with the third sector. Despite the benefits of collaboration being well known within charities, it is not the standard model of working between different agencies, freelancers or consultants.

Agencies for Good wants to ensure a higher quality of work is delivered more efficiently for the most important organisations in our society by tackling this situation. We have been a part of the working group to make this happen.

By creating more opportunities for people at these companies to understand each other, we hope to grow trust between them. This in turn should increase the likelihood of shared briefs, join responses and reuse of existing tools.

Our aims for this year included:


  • Improve the diversity of the community

  • Setting standards for job postings

  • Increase ways for people to connect with each other

  • Drive more inclusivity in the working group

The community continues to grow:

609 members of the community - up from 350 last year

34% of members are active weekly - down from 40% last year

17,330 messages sent in 2022

We have implemented guidelines on our job posting board that include:

Salary

Our community is based on openness, inclusion and transparency. By hiding the salary from your job ads, then you aren’t giving people a fair chance to know if it’s right for them. You’re also likely relying on negotiation - which heavily prejudices against people from certain groups. Read more here: https://showthesalary.wordpres…;

Location and details of what travelling will be required

If you’re remote first, then say that. If you’ve got a London office that you expect people to be in for 3 days a week, then let them know. By not including this detail in job ads you’re wasting people’s time looking at jobs that aren’t right for them.

Remote working flexibility

As the world of work adjusts after the pandemic, many people have looked at their lives and made significant changes. Your job roles should let them know which of these can be accommodated by your organisation and which can’t.

After an extensive and equitable recruitment process, we found a fantastic new community manager - Tamara Schon. She brings a wealth of experience from her time at Ada’s List. She is already having an impact despite only being in the role for a few weeks.

Some of the wins she’s implemented include:


  • Better feedback processes from members for what they want from the community

  • An improved onboarding process for new members

  • Better reporting on the impact we’re having with existing members

  • Reaching out to other organisations to improve the DEI of the community


You can see more detail here:

https://www.williamjoseph.co.uk/impact-case-studies/increasing-collaboration-with-agencies-for-good-2

Plans for next year:

Offer training for all employees on topics related to diversity, equity, and inclusion

Whilst we have always supported elements of training in these topics, there has been little formal programme ensuring that everyone has access to it. We will build this timetable to ensure that we build the capabilities of the whole team in creating equality.

We have set specific, measurable diversity improvement goals

Our equity based recruitment processes have driven a significant improvement of the diversity of our team. However we do not have specific targets around these goals.