Last week, I had a conversation with Aaron Moberger, an employee-owner and cellar manager at Harpoon Brewery in Boston, Massachusetts. Aaron has been speaking at NCEO events and sharing his insights and experiences with other employee-owners for several years now. In fact, one of the reasons he and Harpoon Brewery have been so generous with their time and so willing to share what they have learned with others is because many employee-owned companies in the New England area were so willing to do the same for them when they became an ESOP company in 2014. When the news broke that the company was making the transition, companies such as Web Industries, Carris Reels, Hypertherm, and King Arthur Baking Company were quick to reach out and open their doors to employee-owners at Harpoon Brewery, offering to share everything they had learned on their own ESOP journeys.
The direct involvement of employee-owners in the process of communication and education has proven powerful for ESOP companies working to improve their ownership cultures. While this involvement looks different for many employee-owned businesses, it most commonly comes in the form of an employee-driven communications committee.
Any company, whether it is employee-owned or not, would love to have a culture in which its employees think and act like owners in the workplace. Fortunately for ESOP companies, their employees really do have an ownership stake in the business they work for, but as we have said time and time again at NCEO meetings and events, the ESOP alone cannot create this type of attitude or engagement.
At the NCEO’s Fall ESOP Forum in 2019, I met with a manufacturing company that was concerned about engaging its shop floor employees more effectively in the culture of ownership it was trying to build. They were concerned that their employees working in their corporate offices had more opportunities for learning and more all-around engagement in the business and employee ownership. When their employees took the NCEO's Ownership Culture Survey later that fall, the feedback we collected confirmed their suspicions. Employees in other departments responded 20% less positively than those closer to corporate leadership when it came to ESOP understanding, ownership identity, decision-making, and access to business information.
In this new series of NCEO blog posts, I will explore interesting ownership culture insights on what the NCEO has learned over the years from companies, their stories, practices, and a wealth of survey data collected from employee-owners across the country. I will explore common challenges, best practices, and learn about what employees truly value when it comes to creating a workplace that thrives on ownership thinking.
With remote work, socially distanced production, new shift schedules, and virtual meetings, companies are beginning to head toward a new normal in their operations. The NCEO is developing a survey that will help gather your employee-owners' assessment of how well the new way of working is going and what their ideas are for improvements. It will also give you a chance to check in with how they're managing during these times of crisis.
