Jenni Wilson on Simplyhealth’s purpose-led sustainability

Jenni Wilson, director of sales at Simplyhealth, outlines its journey to becoming B Corp certified and why it's so important to the organisation

Simplyhealth’s purpose is to improve access to healthcare for all in the UK.

We are focused on continuing to maximise our positive impact on improving health outcomes for our customers, communities, and colleagues. And dedicating ourselves to the B Corp movement is at the heart of this.

After recently celebrating 150 years of sustained impact, we are proud of our positive footprint on the environment, the way we contribute to society, and our responsible and consistent governance. ESG and sustainability has enabled us to see the bigger picture - to see the potential in everything that we do and pinpoint how we can make a difference. To us, it is more than just being ‘green’. It’s about using business as a force for good.

Simplyhealth - The UK’s first B Corp health insurer

In July 2022, we were beyond excited to share the news that we’d become a B Corp. Certified B Corps are companies verified by B Lab to meet high standards of social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability.

Becoming B Corp certified is our commitment to uphold our purpose, values, and beliefs. It provides us with a framework to measure our actions, hold ourselves accountable and continuously improve our business and positive stakeholder impacts.

Our B Corp journey

The globally recognised B Corp framework enabled us to assess our impact, clarify our targets, demonstrate our achievements, and set stretching improvement goals for the future.

Having assembled our core B Corp team, we called upon representatives from across the business, to begin assessing our impact. The B Impact Assessment (BIA) used by B Lab consists of 180 questions examining our impact on key stakeholders across five areas – workers, community, environment, governance and customers. This is a freely available tool for any business to use, prior to undertaking certification (around 240,000 businesses globally already use it).

Focusing our attention on the steps within the BIA really allowed us to hone in on the way we measure and track our impact and understand how we compare with other companies. It also showed us where we needed to do more or could potentially go further.

Going beyond ‘talking the talk’

We are proud to say that we are the first UK health insurer to have become a B Corp, we look forward to not only watching, but helping others join us on this journey. While becoming a B Corp may not be the right path for every business, there is plenty to learn from assessing and tracking your impact. Getting certified is a rigorous and time-demanding process, as it should be, but also a very worthwhile one, pushing you to think about the way you do business – including why and who with. At Simplyhealth this isn’t something we do on the side of the desk in addition to the day job, this is who we are and how we do things.

You can learn more about our journey to becoming a B Corp by reading our case study.