Amanda DeVito
First and foremost, I am on the board for the NCEO, so I may be a bit biased! But hands down, one of my most favorite events is their Employee Ownership Conference. Connecting with everyone, sharing stories, and being part of the ownership tribe is an uplifting experience. And now, as we are less than two months away from the 2021 conference, I again start to feel uplifted.
Corey Rosen
Pete Stavros, a partner and co-head of private equity for the Americas at KKR, the third-largest private equity fund in the world, told the Wall Street Journal that he and his wife plan to contribute $10 million to launch the Center for Shared Ownership. The organization will focus on employee ownership through funding research, providing resources for companies to help set up plans, and possibly pushing for legislation and government support. Stavros told the Journal that “Giving ownership to lower-level employees better aligns their interests with those of shareholders and managers, makes them more engaged, and creates a stronger culture. And at a time when rising inequality has led to populist uprisings and geopolitical instability, awarding shares to blue-collar workers can lead to great social cohesion by helping lower income workers—many of whom are racial minorities—build wealth.”
Corey Rosen
An NCEO analysis of Glassdoor ratings of companies on the Employee Ownership 100 list shows that they tend to be more highly rated by employees than their competitors. The study looked at the three main Glassdoor ratings:
Loren Rodgers
The next term of the NCEO's board of directors begins on April 1, 2021, and I am delighted to announce who will be joining our board of directors for this term.
Ivette Torres
Ashleigh Walters, the president of Onex, Inc., will detail the story from her new book Leading with Grit and Grace at two upcoming NCEO events. This story recounts how she and her husband converted their family-owned manufacturing company to ESOP ownership in the middle of a global health crisis.
Corey Rosen
Ken Baker, the CEO of Southampton, PA-based NewAge Industries, has donated $3 million to Montgomery County Community College to start the Baker Center of Excellence for Employee Ownership and Business Transformation. The Center will promote and provide resources on ESOPs and other employee-employer partnerships. It is the largest gift in the college’s 56-year history.
Dallan Guzinski
Having a great corporate culture doesn’t necessarily mean you have a great ownership culture. In fact, a company that recently took the NCEO’s Ownership Culture Survey received feedback from employees that scored above average on just about every aspect of its culture compared to other ESOP companies in our employee survey database. Despite such positive feedback in all these areas, the company’s results were below average on survey items focused on ESOP understanding and ownership identity. For many employees, the ESOP benefit seemed distant and didn’t feel meaningful when it came to their day-to-day work.
Loren Rodgers
The Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing invites applications from doctoral students and pre/post tenure scholars for the 2021–2022 research fellowship competition.
Loren Rodgers
I'm hearing from a lot of our member companies that as we start getting a clearer picture of the coming post-pandemic era, their planning horizons are starting to get longer again. Perhaps in March they were trying to get through the day or the coming week; by fall they were thinking a couple months ahead; and now companies are working to rethink their strategic plans and long-term goals. We've seen this pattern many times over our 40-year history, and in this year's conference we built on that long-term perspective to create sessions that fit this economic moment.
