Employee Ownership Blog

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.

Right-pointing arrow Continue Reading

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.

Right-pointing arrow Continue Reading

Corey Rosen

Colorado Launches New 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.

Right-pointing arrow Continue Reading

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.

Right-pointing arrow Continue Reading

Corey Rosen

Employee Ownership Index Now Available at Infinite Equity

In June 2017, the NCEO created the Employee Ownership Index, an index of publicly traded companies that both had won major awards for high engagement management styles and had some form of broad-based employee ownership. The list was updated each year as some companies were added and some dropped off. Since that time, the Index outperformed the S&P 500 by about a 2 to 1 ratio. Until May of this year, the Index was housed at Motif Investments, an online platform that allowed users to develop funds that others could invest in. Motif was sold to Folio, and Folio does not allow that kind of investment. No other platform allows this, so the Index is not available as an investment.

Right-pointing arrow Continue Reading