| Leading Companies Online Magazine
Employee Ownership Month:
The Perfect Time to Advocate Employee-Owned Great Places to Work
By Anthony I. Mathews, Beyster Institute Staff
 
October is Employee Ownership Month in the U. S., and there is no more fitting time each year to examine the state of employee ownership and to reflect on the achievements and the objectives we have yet to achieve in our very vibrant and growing community.
We know a lot more about employee ownership and its effects on the companies that practice it than we did 15 or 20 years ago. What we know, in part, is that employee ownership is especially powerful when coupled with a style of management that fosters trust and engagement and participation among employees. And we know that combination can be expected to create an enterprise that is both more successful financially and a better place to work from a human perspective than traditional businesses.
We know that employee ownership companies have a number of advantages over comparable companies that do not practice employee ownership including greater profitability, enhanced cash flow and easier growth. We also know that employee ownership companies provide higher pay, better benefits and more generous retirement accumulations than their non-employee ownership peers.
In short, we know that ESOP companies are, in the main, great places to work. But until a much broader section of the population knows that, we will continue to have a hard time getting the idea into the main stream. As long as a few bad examples of employee ownership dominate the public perception of how the model works, we’ll be fighting an uphill battle. But, there are things we can do to make it easier to get up that hill, and one is to be sure we publicize the great examples of employee ownership we all know are around.
In that vein, we’d like to highlight a group that can be a significant help to us in that effort: The Great Place to Work Institute, Inc. Each year, The Great Place to Work Institute publishes lists of the Best Places to Work in America and around the world. In order to identify the “Best Places to Work," the Institute uses a significant vetting process to measure things like employees’ levels of trust in the company, the quality of the culture the company creates and the employees' overall satisfaction with the conditions of work.
We are all familiar by now with the original “list” of the best companies on those and other criteria, the Fortune Magazine 100 Best Places to Work in America. That list routinely includes many of the most respected and admired (as well as some of the most successful) companies in our country. We don’t think it is a coincidence that it also includes a high percentage of companies that practice employee ownership in a wide variety of ways.
©2006. The Beyster Institute and its authors and their entities. All rights reserved.
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