Combining Broad-Based Employee Ownership and Participation in the Management Process
May 7, 2007 This article tells the story of Reflexite and the benefit of combining broad-based employee ownership with participation in the management process: “Companies that share ownership broadly grow 6 percent to 11 percent per year faster than would have been otherwise expected, as long as they have a corporate culture that centers around giving employees the tools and authority to share ideas and information to improve performance. Employees know how the company, their operation and their group are doing. They have specific structures, such as work teams, in which they can make decisions to make the company better.
By contrast, companies that use traditional command-and-control management styles actually perform worse after an ESOP, having raised expectations they fail to meet.”
Reflexite's ESOP Education Committee has received an Annual Award Communications Excellence (AACE) award in 3 of the last 4 years. Reflexite was also the 2006 Grand Prize Winner of the Innovations in Employee Ownership Award “Reflexite, an employee ownership company since 1985, has consistently been a pioneer in ownership management practices and a leader in the employee ownership community. This award, however, recognizes Reflexite's sophisticated approach to integrated ownership, involving not only its ESOP, but a stock option program, a monthly cash "owners' bonus," a global ESOP, and a recently introduced stock purchase plan. This extremely rare combination of short-, medium- and long-term ownership programs complements an extensive education and information-sharing system and ambitious employee”
The article also compares the differences between employee ownership at United Airlines and Southwest Airlines. We also discussed this topic in the following post: ESOP Companies are More Productive. |
