Employee Ownership Blog

Nancy Wiefek

New Research on Employee Ownership and the Pandemic

The pandemic is a critically important time to conduct research exploring how businesses and their employees have fared, and what are successful ways to reduce the negative impacts from this crisis. Employee ownership is a key factor to be explored in this context. The challenge has always been collecting comparison data on companies without employee ownership. With funding from the Employee Ownership Foundation, scholars at Rutgers University’s Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing recently took on this challenge working with the national survey firm, SSRS.  

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Dallan Guzinski

Ownership Culture Insights: Learning from Fellow Employee-Owners

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.

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Corey Rosen

Huawei's Phantom Plan Provides Real Ownership for 90,000 Employees

Huawei Technologies is the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer in the world and the second-largest manufacturer of smartphones. It has close to 200,000 employees worldwide, mostly in China. It also claims to be employee-owned, which, if true, would make it the second-largest majority employee-owned company in the world, just after Publix in the US.

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Corey Rosen

Colorado Creates Employee Ownership Center

Colorado has become the most recent state to create a state employee ownership center. Governor Jared Polis has created the Employee Ownership Office as a standalone center in the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT). The office will have its own dedicated staff. It has $1.75 million in funding over the next two years.

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Timothy Garbinsky

Member Focus: Litehouse, Inc.

At this year's Fall ESOP Forum, we wanted to highlight the member companies that are going above and beyond the call of duty in making their ESOP, their employee-owners, and their communities thrive. For this reason, we awarded the first annual Achievement Award to NCEO member Litehouse, Inc.

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Dallan Guzinski

Ownership Culture Insights: Committees Contribute to Culture

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.

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