Cervest’s Away Day 2023 - A reflection of our B Corp friendly team event

For the Cervest team, it’s incredibly important that our choices align with B Corp values so we can reduce our impact on the planet. In the spirit of B Corp month, Cervest’s Workplace Manager, Nadia Stones, shares her reflection on how the Away Day was planned, executed, and shaped in a B Corp friendly manner.

Organizing an in-person gathering for a globally distributed, remote working team of over 100 individuals is quite a challenge, especially for a B Corp. We wanted both a successful and environmentally friendly event. As Louisa Ziane from Toast Ale, a fellow certified B Corp, said “To change the world, you’ve got to throw a better party than those destroying it.”

I began planning by seeking inspiration from within the B Corp community. Soon the North Star came to me: Emma Wellstead, Founder of Warwick Events, and the planner behind the event celebrating the first 1,000 UK B Corps last November. Emma is very generous with her time and ideas, and her passion for sustainable events is contagious. Inspired by several initiatives aimed at creating better events, paired with Cervest’s current sustainable travel and green supplier practices, I felt ready to move forward. It was time to roll this out.

As a remote-only B Corp workforce, responsible travel has been embedded in our culture from the beginning. For the Away Day, we took small steps including avoiding layovers, reducing drives, and bringing our own water bottles. We chose to work with TravelPerk, a business travel platform, that enabled us to perform paperless bookings, and the ability to offset our travel-related CO2 footprint.

Through TravelPerk, we were able to offset the entire CO2 emissions for all trips and accommodations booked for the Away Day. We selected London as the host city for the event, given 61% of Cervest's workforce is based in the UK. This both reduced the number of journeys and kept traveling distances to a minimum. Many of the team traveled by public transport and in line with sustainable travel policies, we also encouraged climate-friendly routes for those who wished to avoid planes and were willing to accept additional travel time.

In building out this B Corp-friendly event, we focused only on procuring what we really needed. We opted out of many conventional items: we had a digital agenda rather than a printed one, no single-use plates or cups were used, and we decided against having branded clothing or merchandise which is usually a popular choice for this kind of occasion.

For the event venue, we chose LABS House in central London, which sourced local suppliers for our catering and AV equipment. A small step but important to further reducing emissions related to the event.

Proactively reducing the carbon footprint of an event does not make it any less fun! The Away Day turned out to be a huge success. The mixture of workshops, talks, and a Hackathon alongside social fun activities, made it a memorable day as the Cervest team celebrated our shared culture, values and beliefs, all in the same room.

My favorite moment was when our Founder and CEO, Iggy Bassi, took to the stage just as the winter sun was rising. Iggy recalled some of the very first business meetings during the early days of Cervest, back in 2016, which took place just a stone's throw away from the event venue. Standing in front of over 100 climate intelligence pioneers, with the London skyline as the backdrop, it was a moving moment to reflect on how far Cervest has come in the past few years.

Looking forward to future events, I will relish the challenge, and explore additional avenues to minimize our footprint even more. Along with prioritizing event partners or suppliers from the B Corp community that are champions in their sustainability practices. As per B Corp month’s manifesto: “Together, we can go beyond business as usual - for good.”

Read more about how Cervest is building a more resilient future for our planet as a B Corp.