Two years ago, Giorgio De Nardi came into my office and said: ‘you know, I tried to fill out the self-assessment for B Corp: maybe I overestimated something, but do you know that we pass the certification score? What do you say, shall we give it a try?”
So began our journey to become B Corp, joining that global movement of 6000 companies in 86 countries and 158 sectors, including 200 in Italy, that meet the high standards of social and environmental performance, accountability and transparency verified by the non-profit B Lab.
We have thus chosen to ‘declare’ our different way of doing business, the approach that we have always practised and cultivated on a daily basis and which in 2021 also prompted us to become a Benefit Society.
In the Aton I know there has always been a very strong focus on people, on the environment, on sharing core values, on working together not only to achieve but to build as a team a common result.
Having pursued and achieved certification in the first session gave substance and body to the spontaneous manifestations of our way of doing business. This journey has helped us to look inside ourselves and has pushed us to improve again and again in a continuous motion, identifying areas that can be improved and reflecting on how our products and solutions can be used to bring real benefit and positive impact on people, the environment and society.
It has been a long and sweaty journey that has seen us engaged in a rigorous process of measuring and analysing the environmental, economic and social impacts in the five macro-areas of governance, workers, community, environment and customers, provided by the international standard BIA (Benefit Impact Assessment), a benchmark developed by the non-profit organisation B Lab.
I refer you to the video of our CEO, who explains well that ‘B-CORP for us means 3Ps united: Prosperity, Planet, People. We improve the world by digitising businesses’
I close with a special thanks to Anna Manfè and Giovanni Pozzobon who, together with Giorgio and myself, have followed and believed in this path from the beginning. Thanks also to the many atonpeople who have contributed in different ways.