The Influence of the Employees’ Well-being on the Social and Environmental Impact of Organizations: The example of B-Corps

The master thesis represents an exploratory study of the hypothesis suggesting that there is a correlation between employee well-being and organizational ability to have a positive Social and Environmental Impact (further SEI). The research is motivated by the assumption that to have a broader positive SEI an organization should be able to take good care of its internal structures, its employees, and their well-being (further EWB) first before contributing to national or global societal and environmental development. The significance of the research cannot be overestimated in the face of data and studies available about overwhelming costs connected to employees’ sickness and a global engagement crisis connected to burnout rates. Unfortunately, stress and other health-damaging activities at work provoke depression, disengagement, and fatal stress-related diseases that have an impact not only on society but also on economic and environmental development. Moreover, the climate crisis puts further challenges on organizations, while governmental regulations regarding ethical, social, and environmentally friendly business development force organizations to invest in SEI initiatives. Furthermore, demographic development and values, morals, and principal transformation of new generations, such as Generation Z, demand organizations to make solid investments in internal infrastructure and employee branding to attract talent. As any company consists of workers that have their needs and obligation and whose performance critically impacts the overall company performance, it’s crucial to find out if and how EWB influence the organizational ability to have a high SEI. All the above put immense challenges on organizations to balance their investments in a way that benefits both employees and SEI. To completely understand how EWB affects SEI further research is needed. Moreover, to help companies take the right measures and invest effectively it is also necessary to identify specific employee benefits that improve workers’ engagement in the organizational SEI and willingness to contribute to sustainable company values. The current research aims to answer the following question: What is the relationship between organizational investments and other efforts directed to the improvement of the EWB and its SEI? It is focused on the list of certified global Benefit Corporations (further B Corps). For now, the B Lab database encompasses over 8,564 certified companies. The data used in the research is pre-collected data that includes the complete information about all current and past assessments with 122,813 assessment results in total. Using the data from the B Corp website, it can be discovered if there is a relationship between the contributions of a company to the workers’ well-being and its ability to achieve a higher overall B Lab assessment i.e. have a greater overall SEI. The research results showed that the variables are interconnected and develop parallelly i.e. higher Impact Area Workers scores mean higher Overall score and vice versa. The exploratory problem setting delivered multiple useful and interesting research results. Such as the difference between how Impact Business Models influence the Overall score. Moreover, the analysis showed the correlation between other stakeholder scores and the Overall Score. This provides impulses for further research and potential exploration of correlation or causational relationship between two variables.