Taking Stock: Your Employee Ownership Value Proposition

If you’ve read more than one issue or two of this newsletter, you are familiar with the evidence that employee-owned companies are, on average, better employers and have higher rates of retention and net job creation.

What’s the best way to use employee ownership to create concrete improvements in your ability to recruit new employees and retain the people you already have? Consider creating an employee ownership value proposition for your company.

A value proposition crystalizes into a short, clear sentence or phrase the reason someone should want to work at your company. Since a value proposition makes a case for why your company is a better place to work than the alternatives, it needs to capture not just what is good about your company, but why that difference is rare.

Here are a few themes that can be good features of employee ownership value propositions.

Employee Ownership Supports Employee Economic Well-Being

You can share the data on the economic impacts of employee ownership on employee well-being or explain some of the basics—like the value of your company’s retirement plan contributions relative to typical companies (in the case of an ESOP).

Those numbers will speak to some people, and for others, you might want to record some videos of actual retirees from your company talking about the difference employee ownership made for them. One tip: many of our members are finding that it is more effective to talk about the dollars and cents of employee ownership in terms of “wealth building” (something everyone wants to do) instead of “retirement planning” (which many people feel they can put on hold). You can also reinforce that idea with a total benefits statement that reminds each employee how much they receive from the company outside of their paychecks.

Employee Ownership Makes Our Company Different

Beyond dollars and cents, the employee ownership value proposition can also cover why the day-to-day work experience at your company is different from other companies. Many companies tout the “soft” benefits they offer, and everyone describes it differently: an ownership culture, corporate values, servant leadership, teamwork, etc. Two things can help employee-owned companies make that case powerful.

First, explain why employee ownership allows your company to be different. Don’t hesitate to talk about values and how they are reflected in your ownership structure, but you can also highlight some concrete differences, such as in whose interest the company sets strategy, the timeline on which company stock is valued, and more rigorous standards for corporate governance. All of those make employee-owned companies behave differently.

Second, show people how your company is different. For potential recruits, that might mean having them sit in on a company meeting or participate in a tour hosted by the people who would be their peers. You can also show people concretely how your company is different by bringing in speakers from the outside or giving new hires a chance to share their impressions of how the company is different from other places they have worked.

The NCEO Can Help

You know your company is an exceptional place to work, but it can be helpful to have an outside voice saying so. Please feel free to include a link to our public document Working at an ESOP Company in your recruiting materials.

The NCEO has gathered materials, data, and best practices to support recruiting and retention over the years—from conference sessions to newsletter articles to research projects. We have just pulled our favorite resources together into the recruiting and retention toolkit, which we expect to release in early February. This is an evergreen document that the NCEO will continue updating. And it will keep getting better if members contribute their ideas: right now, we’re interested in how companies phrase their own employee ownership value proposition. If you’re willing to share, please email me, Loren Rogers.