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Home > Ownership Culture > Articles > Growing an Ownership Culture >
When companies become employee owned, leaders often have high hopes that employees will start to think and act more like business owners. And employees imagine that they will be treated like owners. Have these visions become a reality at your company?
Ask yourself which of the paired phrases below better describes how you and your co-workers think about work. Rate from 1 to 5 where people in your company fall on the following continuum:
| I work to please my boss. | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | I work to build a healthy business. |
| I do not need to know how this company makes money. | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | I need to know my role in making the company succeed. |
| I am entitled to rewards (bonuses, stock appreciation, dividends). | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | I earn rewards (bonuses, stock appreciation, dividends). |
| I make choices about my actions based on short-term rewards. | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | I make choices based on long-term and short-term goals. |
| Leaders reward me for a job well done. | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | I am rewarded when we achieve our shared business objectives. |
| Add up your total score: _______________ | ||||||
A score of more than 15 points indicates that you and your co-workers--at least some of the time--think more like business owners than hired hands. If your company is like most others, you scored less than 15 points, indicating that you feel that people are closer to the "hired hand" perspective than the business owner perspective.
Are you a bad company if most people feel like hired hands? No. Is it a sign of managerial incompetence or a workforce weakness? No. It is, however, a sign that your company is like most other companies in the United States.
The phrases on the left in the quiz above describe the relationship most people have had toward work for nearly a century. They aren't necessarily bad attitudes; in many ways, those attitudes reflect the model employee. If you agree strongly with the statements on the left, you and the company have an agreement about how you will mutually benefit each other. But that agreement only goes so far; employees provide work in exchange for a short-term reward--usually wages.
In this traditional view, employees don't take ownership of the work process or see their role in improved performance; that's not their job. Given the choice between hired hands or business people, over 75% of company leaders want people to behave and think like business people. Leaders know that they can not achieve high performance in today's changing economy with a bunch of hired hands.
Does employee ownership transform people into business people? Not necessarily. Federal rules on employee ownership do not require that employees become more active in improving their business, receive and understand information about performance, or share in business objectives.
But for many companies, employee ownership is part of a journey from being hired hands to business owners. Most companies find that this journey is bumpier than expected. It is often filled with new communication challenges, a need for broad business education, resistance to change, and hard work in building new approaches to working together. It almost always takes longer than expected.
Why would an employee or company leaders want to take that long bumpy ride? For most companies it boils down to two key benefits: (1) improved company performance (which creates more rewards) and (2) creating a better workplace.
Research on employee ownership suggests that employee ownership alone will not improve company performance. However, companies that have employee participation combined with ownership are likely to outperform other similar companies. In addition to improving the company, people in these companies create more satisfying jobs. That's what you might expect in a company of business people where each person knows how their work contributes to the company's goals and shares in the rewards of success.
What can an employee owner do to help his or her company speed up the journey from a group of hired hands to a company of business owners?
Well-intentioned company leaders who do not challenge people to solve their own problems or who protect employees from bad news may be unaware that they are encouraging employees to think like hired hands. By the same token, employees who stop learning after their employee orientation or regularly provide a list of demands to leaders may be unaware that their actions are reinforcing their hired hand role rather than showing that they are now business owners and wish to be treated that way.
Being a hired hand is the path of least resistance in most companies. It is easier than thinking like a business person. If leaders and employees are going to create their visions of a high performance employee-owned firm, they will need to cultivate new skills and knowledge needed to take the journey toward thinking like business people.
Cathy Ivancic is a consultant for Principal Financial Group. Since 1985, she has helped more than 100 ESOP companies enhance ESOP communications and develop an ownership culture. She is active in national organizations that promote shared ownership and has served on the NCEO's board of directors and as an officer of the Ohio chapter of the ESOP Association.She can be reached at civancic@workplacedevelopment.com.
Copyright © 2002 by The National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO) (phone 510/208-1300; email nceo@nceo.org; WWW http://www.nceo.org/). All rights reserved.
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