California Center for Employee Ownership (CCEO)
The California Center for Employee Ownership provides information and resources to promote a better understanding of employee ownership in California.
Using Ownership Incentives in China
Roy Weber met Cheng Wang, a business consultant and Chinese entrepreneur, at Cheng’s hotel bar in Silicon Valley. Although Roy was slightly familiar with Chinese business practices, he welcomed more advice from a Chinese national. Could Roy transplant Silicon Valley’s model of employee ownership to China, and what would this process entail for a technology startup?
Open Systems: Applying Diverse Employee Ownership Theories to Address Today’s Complex Challenges
The ideas of employee ownership and various forms of profit sharing in corporations have been around for a long time. The shorthand proposition under study is this: If employees observe that they have a meaningful stake in the fortunes of the enterprise, they create value. More specifically, if they have a financial and emotional stake in the performance of the venture, then as individuals and as a workplace community they will raise the level of their performance and productivity.
The Decision-Maker’s Guide to Equity Compensation
This book describes the full spectrum of equity compensation plans (such as stock options, stock purchase plans, stock grants, restricted stock, phantom stock, and stock appreciation rights) available to private and public companies as well as LLCs. Unlike most books on equity compensation, it focuses on helping decision-makers decide what kinds of equity to choose, and who should get how much and when.
Worker Cooperative Case Study: Isthmus Engineering & Manufacturing
While the U.S. manufacturing sector has shrunk over the past 30 years, the fully worker-owned Isthmus Engineering & Manufacturing (IEM) cooperative has thrived in the automated manufacturing industry.
Client Profile: n-Link Corporation
n-Link Founder Sandra Green explains that in the early days she wasn’t exactly certain what employee ownership entailed but knew intrinsically that it was a good thing for the company and the employees.
Sustaining Employee Ownership for the Long Term: The Challenge of the Mature ESOP Company
What do veteran ESOP companies have much to teach us about what it takes to sustain employee ownership over the long term?
Creating a High-Performing Workplace
Beyster Institute Senior Consultant Martin Staubus is teaching a course entitled ‘Management 269: Creating a High-Performing Workplace.’ In this interview, Professor Staubus describes the course’s five themes.
Employees Matter: Maximizing Company Value Through Workforce Engagement
Increasing numbers of businesses view their employees not as a mere cost but as invaluable contributors for business success. These firms are implementing strategies to fully engage employees at all levels. The Employees Matter report identifies sixteen fast growing entrepreneurial firms that employ employee ownership and engagement strategies which they perceive as directly linked with improved business performance. Eight other notable companies with key lessons to share are included as sidebar profiles.
Does Employee Ignorance Undermine Shared Capitalism?
This paper analyzes a survey of employees from multiple companies to assess the extent to which employees are ignorant about company, group, and individual-based incentive pay plans and ESOPs.
Who Benefits from Shared Capitalism? The Social Stratification of Wealth and Power in Companies with Employee Ownership
This paper analyzes social stratification in patterns of access to shared capitalism programs, the value of shared capitalist plan assets, and access to workplace power and authority in a sample of over 40,000 employees in 14 companies with various forms of shared capitalism in the United States.
Show Me the Money: Does Shared Capitalism Share the Wealth?
This paper examines the effect of a variety of employee stock ownership programs – including ESOPs and broad based stock options – on employees’ holdings of their employers’ stock, their earnings and their wealth.
Shared Capitalism in the US Economy: Prevalence, Characteristics, and Employee Views of Financial Participation in Enterprises
Between one-third and one-half of employees participate directly in company performance through profit sharing, gain sharing, employee ownership, or stock options.
Worker Responses to Shirking Under Shared Capitalism
Group incentive systems have to overcome the free rider or 1/N problem, which gives workers an incentive to shirk, if they are to succeed.
Risk and Lack of Diversification Under Employee Ownership and Shared Capitalism
This paper addresses whether the risk in shared capitalism makes it unwise for most workers or whether the risk can be managed to limit much of the loss of utility from holding the extra risk.
Complementarity of Shared Compensation and Decision-Making Systems: Evidence from the American Labor Market
In the 1990s an increasing proportion of US firms moved toward compensation systems that made part of pay depend on the economic performance of work-groups or the firm.
How Does Shared Capitalism Affect Economic Performance in the United Kingdom?
This paper uses nationally representative linked workplace-employee data from the British 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey to examine the operation of shared capitalist forms of pay—profit-sharing and group pay for performance, employee share ownership, and stock options—and their link to productivity.
Do Workers Gain by Sharing? Employee Outcomes Under Employee Ownership, Profit Sharing, and Broad-Based Stock Options
Apart from the extreme cases that get publicized, are employee stock ownership plans generally good or bad for workers?
Stone Finch, Inc.: Young Division, Old Division
CEO Jim Billings wants to attract energetic, entrepreneurial talent to Stone Finch, Inc.
Managing Talent at Bertelsmann AG (A)
Bertelsmann’s EVP HR Immanuel Hermreck and his team were focused on four key HR issues. Three of these were somewhat discreet: improving Bertelsmann’s employer brand; managing Bertelsmann talent across the firm’s decentralized businesses; and ensuring early identification and appropriate development of Bertelsmann’s top 100 high potential managers (hi-pos) to better seed the company’s future top management. The fourth issue-recruitment and retention-played an integral role across all three challenges and had to be strengthened and made consistent across the firm, not an easy prospect given Bertelsmann’s highly decentralized structure.
Building a System of Trust: Ten Hidden Secrets of Success in Employee-Owned Companies
The great potential of employee ownership to improve business performance lies in its capacity to bring people together to work as a team toward shared success.
Breaking The Mold
What is workplace democracy? Workplace democracy is generally understood as the application of democratic practices, such as voting, debate and participatory decision-making systems, to the workplace.
Teams, Not Stars, Are the Key to High Performance
It’s all well and good that a shared ownership stake may promote a team orientation, but does teamwork necessarily translate into superior business results?
Owners as Stewards: What Determines Employee Ownership of Institutional Investment Management Firms?
We examine how employee ownership is used to solve the agency problem between institutional investment management firms and employees.
Reinventing the Firm
Presenting a wide range of quantitative data alongside three new case studies of employee-owned firms, this pamphlet offers a new vision of economic autonomy where democratic companies drive a happier and more sustainable economy.