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B Corp Month: Our focus on employees at Pixel Fridge

March marks B Corp Month! During this month, there is a lot of activity in the B Corp world and we as a team are taking part in activities throughout to further our knowledge and impact. We have joined webinars to understand employee empowerment, prepared meals whilst volunteering at FoodCycle and focussed on our Impact Report for 2024.

In my previous article announcing our B Corp certification, I talked about focussing in on some of the Impact Areas that you are assessed against. This article is going to focus on the ‘Workers’ (or employees) section.

Warning alert. A lot of this article details the specifics and more formal elements of working at Pixel Fridge.

Laying good foundations

The overall message that we want to convey is that we want everyone to have fun at work, to enjoy each others company and to push ourselves to all constantly develop.

One of the main reasons we set Pixel Fridge up was to create a great place to work. Tom, Chris and I had all come across some less favourable agency experiences in the past and we really thought we could do great work, at the same time as being a great place to work. Employees were always going to be key to our journey, and I have to say that we are so grateful to the employees we have at Pixel Fridge for everything they do. You really are great. In return, we want to do the best we can to make sure they enjoy their lives at work.

Prior to completing the B Corp impact assessment, it was clear that we were already ahead of the standards expected for qualification. We already have a certain things in place to allow for good scoring in this sector, such as:

• Pension contributions. This is a legal requirement in the UK (remember, the B Corp status is a Global award), so we were already ticking that box.
• Hybrid working. We already offered our employees the opportunity to work remotely for a few days per week, as well as being flexible about larger chunks of time away from the office if needed.
• Formal employee review processes. Once per year, formally having an opportunity for feedback from the team and a review of your role at Pixel Fridge.

Formalising our perks and benefits

However, whilst we thought we were a great place to work, we hadn’t formalised a huge amount of these perks and benefits. To grow sustainably and be clear with our team about our perks and benefits, we undertook a big exercise to introduce and formalise new policies to ensure our team make the most of being a great place to work.

• Flexible Friday afternoons. At the start of the process, we introduced a formal perk for our staff to have flexible friday afternoons. I LOVE this perk as it gives a little more control and flexibility to our employees (and us!).
• Vitality health insurance. It was clear that we wanted to ensure our employees were looked after medically too. With the challenges we all face with our health system, having access to private healthcare and allowances towards eye care and dental care etc… this was a no brainer. We now offer this, fully covered, to all of our employees after completing probation.
• Enhanced Maternity / Paternity (parental) leave. We’re a small company, so we can’t yet compete with the corporate packages for parental leave, but we wanted to do what we can. So we now offer three weeks full pay for paternity leave and 13 weeks full pay for maternity leave. Whilst this will be something we want to improve on over time, this is a step in the right direction for a company our size at the moment.
• Formal training / learning budgets. We wanted to allow our team the chance to further their learning and skills. We now have a formal training budget (£500 per person, per year) for our team to put towards furthering their knowledge and interests.
• Employee satisfaction survey. We survey our staff twice per year on their satisfaction levels. I truly believe that this is a very powerful way to ensure that we are customising our benefits and perks for our employees. You can’t always please everyone, but we really do try to listen and improve where we can.

The takeaway from this article is to understand that whilst the B Corp process is truly beneficial for us as an agency, it has also been a hugely useful framework on which we as a small, young agency were able to define so much about our business. It gave us the process we needed to go through as well as allowing us to focus in on doing good for people, planet and making some profit.

How did we score?

For us, “Workers” is a high scoring area of the Impact Assessment, which is great news. Those that have done this, we score 36 at the moment! We will however continue to ensure that working at Pixel Fridge really is a good thing!