Last month, The B Team held the sixth gathering of the 100% Human at Work Network in New York City with more than 60 of its members coming together to share best practices and learnings from experiments to become ‘100% Human’ in their companies.

Katarina Wallin-Bureau, Chief Operating Officer of Burson-Marsteller EMEA and 100% Human Network member, spoke about the important role that companies must play to engage and empower women. In a world where women hold only 4.6% of CEO positions in Fortune 500 companies, pathways for women to leadership positions are not readily available. But, as Wallin-Bureau pointed out, there is a clear case for investing in women. Companies with female leadership financially out-perform those without. It is time for business to lead the way on closing the gender gap.

Jenn Lim, CEO & Chief Happiness Officer at Delivering Happiness, a company she co-founded with Tony Hsieh following the radical experiment with Holacracy at Zappos.com, also shared her experience of driving happiness at work, alongside Arianna Huffington, B Team Leader and founder of Thrive Global. Lim and Huffington spoke candidly about their personal ‘aha moments’ and the journey to understanding happiness as an essential ingredient to a more holistic approach to work and as key to empowering employees and to building the right kind of companies.

The overwhelming message from the day was clear: when business is 100% Human in its approach to work, employees thrive and so do businesses. Going forward, as The B Team looks to broaden the focus of the 100% Human at Work Initiative to address some of the biggest human rights challenges including gender equality and LGBT rights and make a positive contribution to solving the refugee and migrant crisis, it will build upon the experiments of the 100% Human at Work Network, and efforts of the network members to drive change through ambitious policy and practice.