Accreditation for Small Organisations
The Good Business Charter is a benchmark for responsible business practices across the UK.
Designed to be adaptable to suit the needs of small organisations and sole traders, it is your opportunity to demonstrate your commitment to people and planet and attract customers who share your values.
The Good Business Foundation has partnered with the Federation of Small Businesses to adapt our accreditation to work for our smaller members, which make up over 99.3% of all businesses. We recognise that once you grow to more than 50 employees you are likely to develop a layer/s of middle management and the business becomes more complex which is why our original questions sought to encompass this. For the Good Business Charter accreditation to work for businesses with 50 employees or fewer, the FSB strongly felt it needed to be made more accessible, streamlined and small-business-friendly.
We are grateful to Craig Beaumont, Samantha Bonser and Martin McTague at FSB for their commitment to the GBC and assistance in designing this part of our accreditation. We are delighted with the result which we believe asks the right questions for each of our components to this important audience. Of particular note, FSB has asked that small businesses who sign up as a good business in this way, also commit to good payment practice to suppliers – paying them within at most 30 days. This matches the welcome and stronger requirements in the Prompt Payment Code.
Accreditation costs just £25 per annum per organisation with 50 or fewer employees.
The Accreditation Process
Do not delay! Accreditation for smaller organisations and businesses is quick and simple. Your application can be completed online and requires you to answer a series of questions based on your individual business and our ten components. Check out the component questions below.
The Good Business Charter also commits organisations to display the GBC Accreditation Stamp in a prominent, permanent place on their website and promote it internally and externally. This commitment to ensure their workforce and wider stakeholders know about the commitments they have made is a requirement of fully completing their accreditation.
Public and Third Sector
Public and third sector organisations with fewer than 50 employees will answer an adapted version of the FSB streamlined questions, removing the tax component since it is not relevant and changing the wording of the customer commitment to stakeholders to encompass beneficiaries and donors.
Small Businesses with a High Level of Temporary Staff
Where an organisation’s core team is small, and well within the 50 employees limit for the streamlined GBC accreditation, but the nature of their business means they have a high number of temporary or occasional workers that takes them above 50 employees, our position is:
- The organisation should use the number of non-event staff when registering with our portal and therefore answer the streamlined questions
- The organisation should contact us or add in the comments how many additional people work for them and are on their PAYE – including casual, seasonal and temporary workers.
- Our first 5 components MUST be applied to the total number of all workers, not just the core, permanent team. So they must be paid real living wage, have fair contracts, experience employee wellbeing, representation and diversity and inclusion. This may be worked out in different ways for different groups of workers as befits the situation, but the GBC components must be applied to all.
The rationale for this position is that the questions for larger companies include pay gap reporting and extensive reference to reporting to a Board of Directors, which does not fit the nature of an organisation such as this.
Rejection policy
We reserve the right to reject an application if we feel that an organisation does not work at the standard of the Good Business Charter for one or more of our 10 components. You can view our protocol on rejecting organisations here.
If you have any questions regarding GBC accreditation, please do contact us.