A Fresh Approach to Funerals
Two minute read
At Poppy’s, we’re on a journey to become a B Corp — a company that’s independently verified to meet high standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability.
Getting there will be a big challenge, one which consists of many small, but significant, steps.
To mark B Corp month, we’d like to share some of these steps with you. It’s a way of celebrating the progress we’ve been making towards our goal in five crucial areas.
We have become certified as a Living Wage Employer. Everyone working at Poppy’s earns at least the real London living wage. We’ve also reviewed our staff benefits — increasing sick pay, lengthening parental leave, supporting flexible working and more —because team wellbeing really matters.
We believe that everyone should have the information they need to make decisions that are right for them about death, dying and funerals.
That’s why we offer free myth-busting sessions to local community groups and health care professionals, and public events, talks and panels.
Book a session or watch previous panel events.
We always welcome feedback on what we’re doing well and what we need to improve. We’ve set up structured processes for finding out what clients think about our service and we share feedback across the team so we can learn from it and act on it.
First things first — in order to reduce our emissions, we need to know what they are. We’ve started measuring everything that we put into the sky or into the ground. We reuse, repurpose or recycle whatever we can. From pacemakers to paper to printer cartridges, very little gets thrown away.
Our coffins are lined with natural material and all our electricity is renewably sourced. Not only that, but we use an electric vehicle to bring people into our care in our mortuary.
We’ve created a staff handbook, which is a code of ethics by which we all work. It puts in writing our behaviours, values, language — everything we do. Because transparency is important to us, we also have a formal programme of sharing all financial information (except salaries) with our employees, every quarter.
Our journey to become a B Corp is more than just trying to meet a minimum standard, or ticking off items on a list, it’s a whole new way to look at what we do and to assess the impact we have.
Every step, however small, makes a difference to clients, team members, our community, and even our planet.
Find out more about B Corp standards and read how and why we started our B Corp journey
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