Receiving feedback can be a powerful tool for improving yourself, your business and ESOP stock value. But, when done incorrectly, it can be powerfully destructive. Here are some practical lessons for any employee owner from my real-world experience struggling to receive feedback on my personal project: the first employee-ownership comic book tale, Mitchell’s War.
The challenge of building a successful ownership culture grows exponentially when an employee-owned company acquires another business. So how does an ESOP company address these issues when its core business strategy is acquiring other businesses? Empowered Ventures (EV) sees adding new companies and employee owners to its growing family of businesses as more of an opportunity than a challenge.
Congratulations, your company just put in an ESOP! Your executive leadership team is ecstatic. You have spent months, or maybe years, learning the technical details, thinking about the benefits and dreaming of the wealth-building possibilities for all employee owners. Now is your chance to tell your employees and your business contacts all about it. How are you going to communicate it? Your enthusiasm for the ESOP may not be as contagious as you might think. It takes work.
With 2021 almost over, it’s time to plan for 2022. Make the most of employee ownership by integrating SMART goals into your 2022 ownership culture and communication planning process. SMART goals are: S = Specific, M = Measurable, A = Attainable, R = Relevant , T = Time based. You can utilize SMART to create a clear ownership communications plan, execute the plan and evaluate your effort.
Do employees at your company roll the dice on safety sometimes? We all probably do, often without even thinking about it. Facing that challenge, BSC Ventures, a custom envelope manufacturer, had a new request for their ESOP annual meeting: let’s play a game that teaches our employee owners how important workplace safety is for all of us, our company and for driving ESOP stock value. That’s how the Workplace Development’s Safety Game was born!
Experience is a powerful teacher. You don’t get a driver’s license just by reading about how to drive a car; you must practice driving the car, too! That’s why understanding your ESOP doesn’t end with one-way communication of the plan rules. In Workplace Development’s ESOP Game, employee owners dive into a business simulation where they actually feel what it’s like to make tough business decisions because they make them. They see the impact of their decisions and what influences the stock value in their ESOP accounts over the course of several years. Software Solutions Inc. and Onex Inc. said the ESOP Game brought ESOP concepts to life for their employees.
Does everyday work really impact company stock value? Absolutely! But sometimes it is hard to see. That’s why MKSK, a planning, urban design and landscape architecture firm, sought a way to help its employee owners learn how everyday actions contribute to value during their annual meeting in 2021. MKSK became 100% employee-owned in September 2019. Workplace Development’s Power of One Dollar learning activity was the perfect fit to illustrate to new employee owners how everyday actions add up.
“A tale of two economies.” That’s the story a recent study reveals about how ESOP participants see their financial stability compared to those who work at non-ESOP firms. The research conducted by John Zogby Strategies found fewer economic hardships reported by employees who work in ESOP companies compared to those who work in non-ESOP companies. Employee owners are more confident about their financial future.
“It looked like we were going to kick off a year of talking about our company's core beliefs," says Theresa Riley HR Director for Equity Engineering Group. And then, the pandemic hit. Any hope for face-to-face conversations were dashed. “We had a new reality in which employees would have to transition to nearly 100% remote work.”
Are you communicating and training effectively to make the most of being employee-owned? MyPath faced the challenge of educating more than 2,000 employee owners spread across two states in nine different companies about what it means to be an owner. The human services company’s innovative, successful solution: the creation of a Certified Employee Owner (CEO) education program.
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