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Alan
87 Posts |
 Posted - 10 Jun 2006 : 09:43:31
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Employee Ownership and Employee Participation
Research indicates a combination of employee ownership and employee participation allows companies to outperform comparable businesses in terms of profitability, productivity and growth:
•Employee ownership combined with good management leads to better performance, the spread of wealth and a better working experience.
•Businesses owned by their employees have achieved exemplary degrees of corporate social responsibility, including involvement with the communities they operate in, and strong commitment to sustainability.
•Managers and the employees are on the same side and together they take the crucial decisions of ownership: distribution of profits, major strategic moves, and board representation.
•Employee owned business governance is characterised by high levels of integrity, transparency and accountability.
The employee owned sector represents a valuable widening in the diversity of corporate ownership models operating successfully in the economy, widening choice for employees, consumers, job seekers, suppliers and purchasers.
Businesses owned by their employees offer a valuable additional model of enterprise by distributing responsibility, and encouraging a collective sense of business ownership, commitment to innovation, and workforce-wide awareness of financial imperatives.
Employee ownership is growing rapidly throughout the world. Some examples include:
•Nearly 25% of employees in the USA are members of an Employee Share Ownership Plan (ESOP).
•In the Mondragon area of Spain's Basque region, employee owned businesses employ 71,000 people and turn over $A16.6 billion a year with $A5.8 billion in employee equity.
•Half the GDP of Italy's Emilia Romagna region is generated by employee owned businesses with 60,000 workers.
Employee buy-outs especially can be a viable and desirable recovery option in insolvency scenarios, particularly in economically deprived areas – by retaining jobs and skills in the local community and ensuring continuity for suppliers and customers.
The purchase of a business by, or on behalf of, the employees offers benefits to the out-going owner, the employees, the wider community and the economy:
•The business owner has an exit from the business which rewards him/her and ensures the business stays alive and goes on to thrive. It avoids asset stripping by competitors and retains the business and jobs in the locality;
•Selling to the employees ensures that the people on whom the business has depended are placed in control of the company, have control over their own futures and are adequately rewarded in the future; and
•Selling to employees gives control to those who have helped to build the business up over a number of years – those who know it best.
Alan Greig
The Mercury Centre (a member of the AEOA).
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admin
626 Posts |
Posted - 19 Jun 2006 : 09:05:08
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From the NCEO Email Bulletin, Mid-June, 2006:
Groundbreaking Study - Work in America Revisited - Authors Urge Employee Involvement and Ownership
Back in 1973, James O'Toole and Edward Lawler (a recent NCEO/Beyster Institute keynote speaker) wrote the groundbreaking study Work in America. Among other things, the study urged the expansion of the then-nascent trend towards employee involvement programs. That book largely defined the way people talked about business for many years. Now the authors have revisited the study in The New American Workplace (Palgrave-McMillan, 2006). They report a considerable expansion of employee involvement programs. "We have seen that the redesign of work is feasible, that a careful alteration of jobs can lead to participation in responsibility and profits, and that the precise nature and extent of participation is a matter for experimentation within each workplace," they told Fast Company magazine (June 2006). But the growth has not been nearly as great as its economic merits would suggest it should be.
"We were naive," they write. "We failed to recognize that the greatest obstacles to high-involvement workplaces are the attitudes and assumptions of top executives. Many are still threatened by the prospect of worker participation. And too many leaders of American corporations still believe they have 'no choice' but to match the working conditions and employment practices of their lowest-wage competitors at home and, increasingly, abroad.
"They are wrong. In 2006, the most promising fact we are able to document is the existence of high-involvement, high-wage, high-profit companies in almost every industry--for example, Southwest Airlines, Nucor Corp., W.L. Gore & Associates, Xilinx Inc., Harley-Davidson Inc., UPS, Costco Wholesale Corp., and Alcoa Inc., to cite just a few. These are productive and growing companies that have lower labor costs overall than their low-wage competitors. Because these companies involve their workers in decision making, reward them fairly for their efforts, and provide them with good training and career opportunities, their employees reciprocate the favor in terms of much higher productivity than workers in comparable low-wage companies. As executives at Starbucks explain, they are able to offer unusually high benefits to their employees not because they charge a premium for their product, but because their productive, customer-sensitive employees allow the company to realize a premium for the products and services they offer.
"The bottom line: All the evidence shows that workers who participate in decision making, training, profit sharing, and stock ownership are so much more productive than workers who don't enjoy these working conditions that they pay for their own higher salaries and benefits. They also work to keep jobs in America."
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Alan
87 Posts |
Posted - 18 Oct 2006 : 06:11:08
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From the NCEO Email Bulletin for Mid October, 2006:
Major New Research Confirms Interactive Power of Ownership and Involvement
On October 6-7, the Russell Sage Foundation and the National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER) held a two-day session in New York to discuss the results of a multi-year NBER research project on "shared capitalism" (employee ownership, profit sharing, and gainsharing). Richard Freeman of Harvard and Joseph Blasi and Douglas Kruse of Rutgers led the research project. Additional papers on other data sets were also presented.
The meeting was keynoted by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel prize winner for economics, who helped developed "prospect theory," a major breakthrough in economics that shows, among other things, that people are much more concerned about a dollar's loss than a dollar's gain and are willing to sacrifice economic gains to assure fairness between parties, concepts that violate classical economic principles of economic "rationality." (The NCEO has often discussed the importance of these concepts to understanding how employees view employee ownership.)
The common theme running throughout the research findings was that employee ownership, as well as other forms of "results sharing" (i.e., rewarding employees based on positive corporate performance), affects employee attitudes and corporate performance primarily when it is paired with employee involvement programs such as work teams, open-book management, and similar practices. The NCEO identified this pattern in its first major research project in the 1980s, and it has subsequently been confirmed in other work.
Organizational behavior scholars such as former NCEO keynoter Ed Lawler also made these arguments many years ago, but economists and the investment community, by and large, have paid them little heed, paying precious little attention to how organizations treat ordinary employees as predictors of corporate success. Given the prestige of the Harvard-based NBER, this conference may be an initial step in gaining more academic credibility for an alternative view.
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admin
626 Posts |
Posted - 17 Dec 2006 : 08:06:07
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Books Worth Reading on Employee Participation
Over the years, there have been hundreds of books on how to initiate employee involvement. Many will leave you inspired but without specific, replicable practices to put in place. Here are a few from the US that have been important in the employee ownership and participation field.
The Great Game of Business, Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham (Currency Doubleday, 1992). This is an essential book for any employee ownership company. Stack’s lessons on how his company, Springfield Remanufacturing, used open-book management to go from near bankruptcy to extraordinary success, have inspired an international business movement. Although 14 years old, it provides a very specific and timely roadmap to getting employees to start thinking and acting like business owners.
Open-Book Management, John Case (HarperCollins, 1995): Case and his colleague at Inc. magazine, Bo Burlingham, were the first business journalists to understand just how powerful open-book management is. In this highly readable book, and its follow-up, The Open Book Experience (Perseus Books Group, 1998), Case provides dozens of examples of how everyday companies learned to share financial numbers with employees to improve business results.
A Great Place to Work,, Robert Levering (Great Place to Work Institute, 2000): Originally published in 1988, with a 2000 update, this book was based on the Institute’s early 100 Best Companies to Work for in America lists, which Levering helped produce. Levering argues that establishing trust at work – trust by employees that managers will do what they promise; trust by managers that employees can take more responsibility – are timeless.
The Knowing-Doing Gap, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton (Harvard Business School Press, 2000): Most managers agree that a culture of high involvement, information sharing and a stake in the outcome for employees is a better way to run a business. But few bridge the gap, Pfeffer and Sutton argue, between knowing what to do and actually doing it. The authors explain why – and what to do about it – through compelling research and anecdotes. For instance, they point to research showing that in groups, the negative people tend to be seen as smartest, building in a bias towards inaction.
The Fifth Discipline,, Peter Senge (Currency Doubleday,1990): This classic book introduced the concept of the “learning organisation”. Senge saw early on that corporations that succeed will be those that are adaptive, flexible and innovative, a challenge that requires everyone to be engaged in learning all the time. His book sets out a variety of ways to accomplish that, as well as discussing why many employee-involvement programs ultimately fail precisely because their success starts to threaten existing managers while making non-managers uneasy about the boundaries of their new rules.
Ideas are Free, Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder (Berrett-Koehler, 2004): This is the antithesis of the “too general” book. The authors provide hundreds of specific examples of ways to get employees to generate ideas, whether individually or in groups. The examples are drawn from all kinds and sizes of businesses and organisations. The authors put special emphasis on generating lots of small ideas rather than just a few big ones.
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admin
626 Posts |
Posted - 27 Dec 2006 : 12:05:54
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The Implications of Participation
The success of an ESOP depends largely on two elements: employee participation in the plan and management’s response to participation.
A successful ESOP should be aiming for the highest possible rate of participation, because participating employees are part-owners and as part-owners, they will be more consciously responsible for the quality of their work and the viability of their workplace. They also stand to benefit from the reforms and improvements their contribution yields.
What are the implications for management?
Management is entrusted by the owners of a company to manage its day to day operations. This has traditionally meant autocratic ‘top-down’ control over all aspects of decision-making – both long term strategic planning and the day to day operational problem solving. The continuing advancements in communications and computer technologies, however, have changed the way business is done, because the speed with which information is received, processed and acted on is now critical to the company’s wellbeing.
This ready availability of up-to-date information can help with effective strategic planning and the effective harnessing of these technologies for day to day operations can give a company a competitive edge.
These technologies require a change in organisational culture and style, because operational problems can and should be solved at the coalface, meaning management has to delegate and empower employees to make ‘bottom up’ decisions.
Management still retains its overall decision-making control and responsibility, but it restricts the number of the decisions it makes alone to those where it has special expertise or judgement, and allows employees to make operational decisions at the workplace where the employees’ particular knowledge and expertise comes into play. What we are talking about, in effect, are leaner and flatter organisational structures. Such organisations can be committed to improving the quality of decisions throughout the whole organisation through speedy and democratic sharing of information in both directions (up and down the line) and, where appropriate, providing the necessary skills and training to improve performance. This requires management to empower and encourage employees to share the responsibility and benefits of independent decision-making. In the long run, management has more control over its environment by being better informed, and the whole team can focus on achieving business goals and attaining the competitive edge that benefits everyone.
(From: “Understanding ESOPs”: The Workbook, AEOA, 1995)
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admin
626 Posts |
Posted - 11 Jan 2007 : 06:33:27
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Why Don’t People Participate More?
Most people aren’t the least bit shy about saying what they think about politics, sports and their neighbours, even though they may know less about these things than they know about their job. ESOP companies often find that people are reluctant to participate in sharing ideas and information about how their job is performed – a key to process to business improvement. It is worth exploring some of the possible reasons for this.
Lack of Confidence
Most employees have rarely, if ever, been asked what they think. Now that they are, many are afraid to express their ideas. While people may think they have something important to share, they may not feel confident in their ability to express it. Rather than appear foolish, they say nothing at all. Lots of encouragement can help overcome this. Better yet, structure opportunities where everyone feels free to say something, but no-one is criticised, such as brainstorming sessions.
Lack of Conviction
Employees may think they may have a useful idea, but they are not sure. Even if they feel confident in their ability to express themselves, and even if they are not worried about looking foolish, they may still keep it to themselves because they don’t want to burden people with something that may not prove productive. Many of the best ideas are lost this way because the initial thought may have initiated a whole new series of ideas. One of the goals of participation is to get these creative conversations going.
No Feedback
The number one complaint heard from employees about why they don’t participate more is they don’t get any feedback. They submit an idea or point out a problem and never hear about it again. One or two experiences like this can turn off the flow of ideas for a long time. Specific requirements for feedback have to be part of any participation program. Preferably, these should be in writing, with detailed explanations. Employees can be part of this feedback process.
Too Much Negative Feedback
The answer can’t always be no, although this is a tricky issue. Obviously, managers don’t want to approve bad ideas. On the other hand, some ideas are probably neither clearly good nor bad. It may make sense to spend some resources on uncertain ideas. Very often, when these ideas are reviewed further, they can change shape and become something useful.
Nothing Will Happen
Even if employees feel sure of themselves and get helpful feedback, they may still not want to participate much if they do not see results. In some cases, ideas may bring about changes, but no-one knows about them. More often, good ideas languish in the “in” boxes of people with other priorities. It is important to set up a process that clearly communicates when action will be taken and what the results of the action eventually are. This encourages everyone’s involvement.
Ambiguity
Even if these problems are solved, employees still may be deterred by ambiguity. When do you speak up? Can you take time away from your job to speak to someone? Where do you have this conversation? Should you talk to a supervisor or handle the matter with other employees? How much time is reasonable to spend on the issue?
Credit
Having jumped all these hurdles, employees may still become disillusioned if they find someone else takes the credit for (or no-one gets credit for) an idea that is implemented. Recognition is important. It is a low cost, but priceless, investment in ESOP companies.
What To Do
Companies cannot surmount these barriers by just allowing employees to participate. They must set up structures that provide an environment conducive to generating ideas that then get prompt, thoughtful feedback and appropriate implementation and recognition.
For further useful information on participation issues in ESOPs, see the NCEO web-site at: http://www.nceo.org/culture/culture_articles.html
(Adapted from an article that appeared in “The Employee Ownership Report”, NCEO, July/August, 1994)
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admin
626 Posts |
Posted - 17 Feb 2007 : 06:19:18
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A Participation Checklist
Creating a participative management system involves restructuring work in dozens of ways. To help make sure you are covering all that needs to be covered, it helps to develop a checklist of key “to do” items. The checklist that follows is not meant to be the final word on this, but should help give you ideas to develop your own. For each of these areas, you should determine:
• What structures are available to help employee owners share ideas and information?
• What indicators do you use to see if employees are getting involved?
• How do these efforts contribute to the firm’s objectives?
Establishing the context
Corporate goals need to be articulated to all employees and should be related to how each individual performs his or her job. Each grouping of employees – teams, departments, units, profit centres etc – should develop its own goals within the context of corporate objectives. As part of this process, people need to know about their industry, the company’s financial, quality and production performance and how and what they do relates to what other people do in the company.
Potential Areas of Employee Involvement
Social Events
Human Resource Management and Personnel Decisions
- Hiring, firing, or career development policies
- Selection or review of supervisors/management
- Policies on work rules, vacation, and compensation
- Complaint resolution procedures
- Employee training and assessment
- Establishment, evaluation and change of participation process
Occupational Health and Safety
Working Conditions, Work Design and Work Performance
• Product and service introduction and change
- how products, services and processes are developed
- how products and services are evaluated and improved
- how customer requirements are incorporated
• Quality Control and Continuous Improvement
- process control issues
- how product and service quality is measured
- how quality compares to competitors
- how customer satisfaction is measured and responded to
- how correction decisions are made and implemented
Work area layout and capital equipment purchases
Supplier Relations
- How quality and timeliness are assessed, improved and assured
- How supplier choices are made
- How materials are received, tracked and used
- How suppliers can be helped to raise standards and/or lower prices
Customer Relations
- How new customers are developed
- How customers interact with the company (direct contact with shop floor employees?)
- How future customer needs or markets are analysed
- Billing, collection and contract procedures
- Customer follow-up
- Knowledge of customer base
- Developing standards and techniques to measure customer satisfaction
Corporate Issues
- Input into or information on strategic decisions at board or management level
- Information and training about corporate finances
- How financial information is related to specific work issues
- Corporate goal setting
- Investment decisions
- Information flows other than finance (production, quality, personnel, marketing etc.)
Marketing Employee Ownership
- Identification of company as employee owned in marketing material
- Internal marketing of ownership plan to employees
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admin
626 Posts |
Posted - 04 Apr 2007 : 15:47:36
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Obstacles to Employee Participation
The first obstacle to employee participation concerns past learning. The traditional way of managing as it has developed in the twentieth century assumes a strict division of duties between managers and those who are managed. This system assumes that only managers are capable and responsible enough to be trusted with decision-making and that everyone else should simply do as she or he is told.
This system worked well in the past, when many people had little education, when the business environment was relatively stable, and when technology and products were simple and changed slowly.
These conditions no longer exist. The best managed organisations recognise that employees want and expect to have more input into the running of the operation. Moreover, they see this input as a vital resource in helping the company to cope with a dynamic and complex environment.
Old habits are hard to change, however, and many managers feel their employees lack the competence, the responsibility or even the interest to participate constructively in organisational decision-making.
While this is sometimes the case, many studies have shown that managers consistently underestimate the interest employees have in participating, especially at the job and department level.
Edward Lawler suggests (in his book High Involvement Management: Participative Strategies for Improving Organisational Performance, 1986) that there are four key elements that are necessary before employee participation can be effective, and that all four must occur together. These are power, information, knowledge and rewards. If employees are to be held responsible for results, then they must have power to make decisions. However, power without knowledge and information leads to incompetent decision-making.
Power without the appropriate reward structure can lead to irresponsibility and abuse. A reward structure that aligns the interests of the individual with those of the organisation is needed. Employee share ownership can be part of this reward structure, although other aspects of the system are important.
Bringing power, information, knowledge and rewards together is a complicated process, particularly in a large organisation. It requires leadership and commitment on the part of management.
Employee ownership can help to provide the necessary reward structure, especially if the amount of ownership is significant. It also provides some information, particularly financial information. It may provide power if employee owners participate in the election of the Board of Directors, although this power is sometimes minimal. In any case, the place where employees want most power is at the job or work unit level, where they are also likely to have considerable knowledge and some information.
A concern for some managers is that employee owners will want too much power or influence in decision-making, and that managers will no longer be able to manage. This rarely happens. Most employee owners recognise that managers must perform coordinating roles and it is not appropriate to second guess every decision or to take a vote on every issue. It may be, however, that fewer managers and levels of management are required as employee owners take on more responsibility for decision-making in their areas of operation. Most firms find this a major advantage.
Sometimes management is the obstacle to participation, but employees themselves can also be an obstacle. If they have operated in the past under a system that neither encouraged nor rewarded employee participation, they may have learned to be apathetic at best and irresponsible at worst.
If there is not a high trust level between management and employees, attempts to increase employee participation may be seen as a trick to take advantage of employees, or in a unionised setting, to undermine the union.
In addition, the knowledge base of employees may have atrophied through lack of use and employees may indeed feel they have little to contribute. Some may lack basic communications, information processing and interpersonal skills which are necessary to make participation work. Some may be near retirement and just want to “coast”.
Any of these obstacles can be serious, but many employee share ownership firms have overcome them.
(From: Employee Share Ownership: Managing and Communicating for Ongoing Success, Dr Richard J. Long, University Of Saskatchewan, Canada, 1990)
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admin
626 Posts |
Posted - 17 Aug 2007 : 05:04:20
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ESOP Committee Development
This is an executive summary of a seven-part article published in the ESOP Committee Guide, The National Center for Employee Ownership, 2000 by Stephen Clifford, Loren Rodgers and Christopher Mackin, which can be accessed at: http://www.nceo.org/pubs/esopcommittee.html
Overview
An ESOP Committee can add tremendous value to communication efforts and the successful growth of an effective culture of ownership. In turn, an effective culture of ownership can have a dramatic effect on company performance in ESOP companies in a variety of ways:
• encourage employee involvement,
• increase understanding of employees’ attitudes toward ownership,
• contribute to a healthy ownership culture, and
• contribute to the creation of a high performance work organization.
This article helps leaders, managers and ESOP Committee members to understand the stages of growth and difficulties many committees face. Further, it supplies guidance and direction that will help a troubled ESOP Committee back on track.
Introduction
Each committee will develop in its own way according to the interests of the members and the formal responsibility and authority delegated to it. Different types of ESOP Committees will behave differently and progress in different ways:
• ESOP Trustee Committees share a legal, fiduciary responsibility for the ESOP trust.
• ESOP Communication Committees are often responsible for encouraging and fostering a sense of "ownership" among employees.
For more information about these two basic types of committees and about common early issues in the development of ESOP committees, see the Guide mentioned above. For example, one crucial decision in the early life of a committee is whether the committee is to be "advisory" or "activist."
Development Process
The four stages, described briefly below, are covered in greater depth in the full article.
• Stage 1 is the infancy stage, or "forming" stage. Primary influence over the committee's behaviour ("locus of control") is external and the "focus of concern" is internal.
• Stage 2 is the adolescent stage. As individuals settle into their committee identities, they begin to struggle with each other for power and influence.
• Stage 3 is the adult stage. As the group settles its internal difficulties, members focus on group challenges and begin to exercise its authority. The "focus of concern" will be on external issues, and the "locus of control" will turn internal as it begins to exercise its own authority. This is when the group becomes most productive.
• Stage 4 is the older adult stage. At this stage, members often become disheartened and disappointed at their perceived failures. Further, new ideas and changes may meet hostility as the group shies away from possible failure.
Every group will progress through these stages at its own pace. Few will follow a straight, "linear" progression. This forward and back progress may be frustrating, but it must be endured and accepted. It is the natural process the group must go through.
The group's productivity will vary throughout the process. Stage 1 may be somewhat productive; Stage 2 will not be, but will lead to a highly productive Stage 3. (In fact, the more difficult Stage 2 is, the more trust develops, and the more productive Stage 3 is likely to be!) Productivity declines in Stage 4 as the group loses focus and energy.
Conclusion
ESOP Committees can contribute to company success in a range of ways. They can help foster a high level of "ownership identity" among employees which is strongly correlated with high performance organizations. But ESOP Committees will not always be highly productive. However, the difficulties are worth working though as a productive ESOP Committee can help employees embrace a positive "culture of ownership." In nearly every major study, companies with a "positive culture of ownership" have been shown to out-perform their competitors.
For more information about ESOP Committees, see : http://www.nceo.org/library/committee.html
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admin
626 Posts |
Posted - 03 Oct 2007 : 03:37:55
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Open Book Management: Sharing Performance Information with Employees
According to Inc. Magazine, “Open Book Management” (OBM) may well be the most important management trend in the country, transforming employees into entrepreneurs and giving companies an effective performance incentive.
Here are answers to a few’ of the most frequently asked questions at the Great Game of Business(GGB) organization. GGB is a spin-off of Springfield Remanufacturing (an employee owned company in the US), which pioneered the practice of open book management so successfully that its CEO, Jack Stack has written several books on OBM and has a regular column in Inc. magazine on the subject.
Does “opening the books” mean we have to disclose everything - including compensation information?
Start by keeping things focused and simple, driving a common understanding of your company’s critical number and how your troops can move that number in the right direction. Don’t deluge them with too many numbers in the beginning, but don’t “hide” information from them either. However, if you do not really intend be open about sharing business information, don’t start.
We don’t think that it is necessary to share individual compensation; instead we lump together everyone’s salaries and benefits into one line on the income statement. This lump number is important for people to see and monitor, but we don’t find that individual salary disclosure is necessary or even beneficial.
Our employees don’t care about the company’s finances. Why force the information on them?
Are you sure they don’t care? Do they care about job security? Career opportunities? Improving compensation? You do need to make sure they understand that these things affect their employment, as well as many more that are directly influenced by the result of the business.
We’re trying to run a business. Where will we find the time to train employees, have weekly meetings, and keep track of the results?
Companies seem to have the time to argue, work in conflict between departments, complain about working conditions or lack of results… but they don’t think they have the time to fix these things. Sure you will spend more time working on critical numbers, forward forecasting results and making sure people understand - by repeat. repeat, repeat. But what many people fail to see is all the wasted time in meetings that you won’t spend. There is no question that it is hard work…but it does work.
Won’t opening the books to my employees make me vulnerable to my competitors?
If your employees feel more and more involved, are they more or less likely to share information with competitors that will hurt you?
Will it work in a very large company?
It is challenging…. Getting a sense of teamwork, consensus and open communication all become more difficult as the size of the company grows. Be sure to start by breaking down your organization into the smaller “natural teams” that exist within your company. Getting senior management support will really help the effort
Visit the GGB website at http://www.greatgame.com/
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admin
626 Posts |
Posted - 16 Oct 2007 : 08:52:51
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Gainsharing Rewards Employee Involvement
Australian companies are redefining incentive plans to focus attention on success. Gainsharing plans are a good example. By rewarding specific achievements, they can move an organisation ahead dramatically.
Gainsharing answers the common question — “What’s in it for me?” It tells employees that their company is prepared to pay for improvement. The gains — measured by a pre-determined formula — are shared with eligible employees, often as cash bonuses. Gainsharing is becoming popular in various industries in Australia. In the U.S. - where gainsharing is better established - the payback for group incentive plans averages $2.22 earned for the organization for every dollar spent on the payout (Source: American Compensation Association). That works out to a net return on plan investment of 122%.
For organisations looking to foster greater employee involvement, gainsharing is a win-win situation: when there is an improvement in specific business measures, the employees share in those gains monetarily.
But note that gainsharing is not profit sharing, since it can extend beyond just financial measures to include operational improvements such as safety and customer satisfaction. Normally, each measure pays a bonus in its own right and is not dependent on another area.
Gainsharing starts with senior management deciding to create a corporate culture that encourages employee involvement, usually to build a high performance organization.
Once this is decided, follow these steps to implement an effective gainsharing plan:
1. Establish a gainsharing design committee from across the organisation.
2. Train them in how the organisation makes money.
3. Identify specific, measurable business goals for the upcoming year.
4. Determine how the results can be measured.
5. Test the measures to ensure they are reliable and set a performance baseline.
6. Determine how the gains will he shared between the shareholders and employees.
7. For the plan to pay for itself, there has to be a financial return to support the payments. Some measures may not produce a direct financial result, so there needs to be at least one financial improvement that can fund the plan.
8. Design a pay-out schedule which shows the required baseline for each measure and how the plan generates award dollars beyond the baseline for each measure.
9. Develop employee communications to explain the gainsharing plan. Use various tools - face-to-face meetings with staff being the most effective. Also print plain-language reference posters, brochures and updates.
10. Obtain managerial approval of the plan design.
11. Roll out the gainsharing plan, concentrating on how employee groups can examine and improve their work processes. These changes provide the required line-of-sight for employee, and when aggregated, have a significant impact on business results.
Introducing a gainsharing initiative takes commitment and energy from the entire management group. Supervisors and managers are required to take a leadership role and act as a resource to employee teams to help them realise opportunities for improvement as they are identified. Fostering employee involvement and a continuous improvement environment becomes a way of life for the organisation.
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admin
626 Posts |
Posted - 12 Dec 2007 : 07:31:36
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Creating ownership when you already have participation
An increasing number of companies are finding themselves in the position of beginning to share ownership after having already established participative cultures. Many open-book management companies, for example recognize that giving employees a financial stake in the business is a natural extension of their corporate culture. For these participative companies, the introduction of an employee ownership plan requires particular attention to helping employees understand the plan and how their efforts can help it grow from the outset.
At some point, employees in companies that have participation without ownership begin asking themselves: “Why should I participate? What’s in it for me?” While short-term programs such as profit sharing or productivity incentives are a key component to motivation, ownership adds an essential long-term incentive and perspective. It helps employees understand the necessary balance between short-term profit taking and long-term growth needs.
If they want to create a high performance ownership culture, companies need to make sure that:
• Employees understand the meaning of ownership. They move beyond “I’m an owner” to the notion of a community of owners.
• Employees can communicate openly in all directions
• Employees understand and are committed to the company’s business goals.
• The company provides extensive financial education and gives employees ways to affect corporate outcomes.
• The company’s needs and the individual’s needs continue to be balanced as employees understand how individual actions affect the company as a whole.
A key challenge that exists in every employee ownership culture is aligning ownership expectations: what do people think ownership is? This challenge is especially interesting for companies that are already highly participative because employees may already think they have some of the attributes of ownership. What is it that is different about being an actual owner and how should behaviours change? Another challenge is to identify gaps in what is already being done to encourage participation, to determine what else will maximize on the opportunities that adding ownership provides.
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admin
626 Posts |
Posted - 08 Apr 2008 : 10:12:10
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To Get Employee Involvement, Structure It, Don’t Just Allow It
In a recent NCEO case study of an employee owned company, the experience of former NCEO staff member Michael Quarrey, now the plan manager at FilmX, demonstrated how the real transformation in ownership culture at his company came after he realized that employee participation wouldn’t just happen because he allowed it and even encouraged it. It occurred when employee involvement was both an expected behavior and channeled into specific structures designed to help employees focus their collective attention on business problems and opportunities. For FilmX, that structure was the “Kaizen” event, a three-day meeting where employees involved in an issue meet to map out how the company can develop better processes, products, and services. Kaizen blitzes have worked for FilmX, but other companies might find alternative structures more appropriate.
Simply Allowing For Participation Is Not Enough
Most leaders at employee ownership companies sincerely want employees to think and act like businesspeople. They want people to contribute ideas and information freely, yet they find that this kind of involvement is the exception rather than the norm. This is not surprising. Put yourself in employees’ shoes, for instance. Absent a specific structure for participation, just when and how do you share your ideas? Can you really just leave what you’re doing and go walk through the manager’s “open door?” And if you do, will the manager really listen? Will your idea get specific feedback? Will the managers actually end up taking credit for the idea, or, maybe worse, give you credit in a very public way that makes your peers think you’re just apple polishing?
Managers may welcome new ideas, but they are also accustomed to making decisions. They trust their own judgment and experience. When an employee comes in with an idea they have not thought of themselves, it’s only natural for managers to think of reasons why it won’t work or is not important enough to act on. A new idea may require more energy and time than they feel they have to offer.
Transitioning From Encouragement to Structure
Given these and other barriers built into even the most “open door” companies, it’s not puzzling that employee involvement is so limited when it is simply permitted. Getting past these barriers requires that participation be explicitly structured into people’s jobs and the company’s decision-making. People at all levels need to understand that contributing ideas and information—and listening to other people when they do—are important job skills. Managers particularly need to be evaluated on how well they encourage this process.
In order for this to succeed, however, it needs structure. There are many alternative methods - Kaizen blitzes, work teams, self-managing teams, quality circles, the “Great Game of Business”, cross-functional teams, ad hoc teams, even elaborate suggestion systems. Groups also need well-considered metrics to know if their ideas contribute to profitability. The key to each approach is that employees have regular opportunities to sit down together and talk about the business. The more these opportunities have specific parameters about what can and should be discussed, how decisions are made, and how much responsibility the group has the better, the more successful each group will be.
Finally, to get all this going, it’s important to start with an employee-management steering committee that can figure out the best initial structure. This process will often need tweaking, or maybe even reinventing, on an ongoing basis. The committee’s broad structure makes any adopted approach more legitimate and well-informed. This process will rarely be a “slam dunk.” There will be glitches, resistance, and problems. But, as Quarrey would eagerly attest, the results can be impressive.
From: Employee Ownership Report, NCEO (US), January/February 2006
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admin
626 Posts |
Posted - 13 May 2008 : 05:24:53
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Encouraging Ideas through Improved Feedback
Almost without exception, the most common reason employees tell us they don’t submit more ideas is the lack of feedback. Or maybe the feedback is “I’ll get back to you” or “We tried that before.” In other words, “don’t bother me.” It doesn’t take a lot of this indifference to get people to stop submitting ideas altogether.
Of course, management often has its reasons. There are only so many ideas you can respond to, and some are pretty flaky or undeveloped. Besides, even with the best intentions to get back, sometimes the press of other matters is just too great.
This focus on maximizing the current use of time is understandable but unfortunate. It takes time to explain why an idea might not be worth pursuing and a lot of time to explain why a lot are not, but just a few good new ideas can make that time well worth spending. Say a manager spends one full day a month providing good feedback for 50 ideas. Forty-nine are useless, but one will save $1,000 a year. That looks like a pretty good use of that day.
So why not just respond to the one good idea? First, you might miss it in the rush to dismiss the other 49 quickly. Second, there is a very high likelihood you will never get it to begin with because people will be too discouraged to submit any ideas. Moreover, as you provide detailed feedback, people will learn about what makes for a good idea, so the success ratio of ideas will grow.
Several practices make feedback more effective:
Make it personal: As much as possible, provide the feedback in person. At the very least, hand the employee a written response, or, if the employee is not physically nearby, make a phone call. Thank the employee and encourage more ideas. This small step takes a few more minutes but demonstrates genuine commitment.
Make it fast: The longer it takes to get feedback, the more the employee will assume that management doesn’t really care much about the process. If it will take more than a few days, explain why right away and provide a specific deadline.
Make it detailed: Provide a step-by-step explanation of why the idea won’t work or how it might work if changed or developed. Consider providing a form to fill out for submissions to help employees develop their ideas more fully to start. It also provides an outline for the manager to respond in more detail.
Find something useful whenever possible: Many ideas have something of value, even if the idea itself won’t work. Perhaps a real problem has been identified but the solution is not there. Maybe some piece of the idea can be developed, perhaps even to address some other issue. At the very east, the employee cared. Trying to build on the positive will encourage more effort not just by that employee, but by the colleagues who hear that this time, the feedback was not so negative.
Create a process for ideas that have any promise: For any idea that even might work (even if you’re skeptical), create a process that seems legitimate to employees for further evaluation. This might be some kind of employee screening team, for instance, that can provide further feedback and, if the idea merits development, set the wheels in motion for the next step.
If this seems like a lot of work, it is. But, as Thomas Edison pointed out, genius is 99% perspiration and just one percent inspiration.
From: Employee Ownership Report, July/August, 2007, NCEO (US).
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admin
626 Posts |
Posted - 14 Jun 2008 : 05:08:33
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Small Ideas Matter
Last year a member company of the US NCEO decided it needed to find ways to save money. So it solicited employee ideas in various small group meetings. It was the first time a process like this had been tried, and it produced mostly a series of very small ideas. Discouraged that the results would not have a material impact on costs, the program was not tried again.
The disappointment was understandable, but the decision premature. Even if the sum total of the small ideas did not justify the time spent to generate them, what matters most is to start getting employees to think in these terms. Any ideas people come up with provide a platform to discuss what drives the company’s financial performance, whether the ideas are useful or not. The employee who suggests making rubber band balls to store used rubber bands may not have saved the company much money, but if someone explains why, pats the employee on the back for making the effort, and maybe suggests some other areas that need thinking through, the next ideas may well be better. Moreover, the group process to come up with ideas - any ideas - can get people to start talking about the business. If they get good, timely feedback, this can be fodder for the next discussion and maybe better ideas or a better process.
Some specific techniques might help move the process forward:
1. Develop critical numbers:
For each function in a company, help employee groups develop critical cost analyses. What specific areas are causing cost problems? Is it excessive overtime use, customer returns, scrap, high phone bills, increasing postal rates, energy consumption? How would a reduction of $1 in cost in any of these areas affect profits? How would driving down costs increase share prices (share prices are a multiple of earnings, so a dollar saved is not a dollar more—it’s several dollars more—in stock prices).
2. Encourage employees to look outside the company for ideas:
People can ask friends, search the Web, call people in similar organizations (other employee ownership companies are usually eager to share ideas), or, if it is a larger company, get ideas from other people in the company, whether they work in that function or not. Better yet, charge groups with setting up a specific process for looking outside the company for more ideas.
3. Find effective meeting techniques that work:
No one needs to reinvent the wheel on this. There is a ton of literature and experience on what makes a meeting effective. A good place to start is the wonderful book Ideas Are Free, which gives dozens of examples of specific techniques used to help people generate ideas. Web searches and many good books can also be a source for practical ideas on meeting structure. (See the topic above on books worth reading on employee participation). Keep in mind that what works for one group in a company may not for another.
4. Map the process:
Have each group map its process for how decisions on spending money are made. This may uncover unexpected issues. Maybe the office manager, for instance, is relying on only one supplier or the truck drivers don’t have a process for fuel monitoring.
5. Assign each person a line item:
Each function’s expenditures can be broken down so that everyone gets one or two line items to track over a period of time and come back to the group with a report the group can then brainstorm.
6. Create a game:
Chart the results and provide some fun reward every quarter or other period to make it more like a game than a talk.
From: The Employee Ownership Report, Sept/Oct 2006. NCEO (US)
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admin
626 Posts |
Posted - 14 Jun 2008 : 09:20:56
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Employee Ownership and Employee Engagement, Involvement and Participation
Check out the AEOA's new web-page on the above topic, including our statement "Employee Ownership + Voice = Business Success".
You can see this page at:
http://www.aeoa.org.au/0024/default.asp?id=64 .
Alan Greig
Public Officer
AEOA
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admin
626 Posts |
Posted - 16 Feb 2009 : 05:28:05
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Ownership, Involvement and Trust: A Virtuous Cycle
(The following article has been provided by Associate Professor John Shields, Discipline of Work and Organisational Studies, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Sydney. It summarises the theme of his major presentation "From Bull to Bear: Equity Based Incentives in Turbulent Times" , to the AEOA AGM on 11th December, 2008 - see our 2009 News page at: http://www.aeoa.org.au/0024/default.asp?id=65 for more information.
The AEOA gratefully acknowledges the contribution that Prof. Shields has made here to the study of employee share ownership in Australia).
Broadly-based employee share ownership plans (ESOPS) can encourage greater employee interest in company success, closer integration of individual and company goals, stronger employee engagement and retention, higher discretionary effort and a high trust work climate. Not surprisingly, then, such plans have been shown to have a positive impact on organisational productivity and profitability. However, as with many other reward plans, the positive outcomes to which ESOPS may give rise are essentially contingent rather than assured. The available research evidence suggests that two of the key contingencies are, firstly, the presence of genuine employee involvement practices and, secondly, a high-trust work climate. In combination, equity ownership, involvement and trust can engender and sustain a virtuous cycle of high performance.
One of the clearest findings in the extant research evidence on ESOP efficacy relates to the extent to which the plan is accompanied by opportunity for genuine employee involvement and voice. There is strong evidence of positive outcomes when share plans are introduced in conjunction with employee participation programs which give employees more voice in organisational decision-making. A study by Rosen and Quarrey (1997) compared the performance of number of firms before and after they introduced employee share ownership with a matched sample of non-share-plan firms and found no significant difference between the two sets of firms. However, when they compared non-share-plan firms with those that had introduced both share-ownership and employee involvement practices, they found a major difference. The latter grew 11%-17% faster than the former.
By itself, then, an ESOP is unlikely to provide sufficient impetus for transforming traditional low-trust firms into high-trust, high-performance firms. Something more is needed to affect a lasting change in organisational climate and culture: genuine employee voice. Research by Long (1981, 1982) suggests that the chief benefits in terms of employee motivation derives more from the presence of a participative management style than from employee ownership alone. Long’s longitudinal case study of declining motivation and satisfaction under a share plan introduced by a Canadian electronics firm in the late 1970s seems to bear this out. Employee-owners felt increasingly disaffected because they were not given adequate opportunity to participate in day-to-day decision-making.
ESOPs can certainly support workplace transformation from low-trust, low-performance to high-trust, high-performance, but eliciting the full benefits of an ‘ownership mentality’ requires supporting policies and practices, especially ‘open book’ management, employee consultation and involvement programs. Moreover, the underlying causal relationship here also appears to be cyclical rather than unidirectional in that a well-designed, well-communicated and well-maintained ESOP can also reinforce participative management practices.
As a stand-along organisational change initiative, an ESOP is very likely to disappoint; as a key element in a bundle of change enablers, it has every prospect of exceeding the long-run expectations of both the organisation and its employees.
References
Long, R. (1981), ‘The Effects of Formal Employee Participation in Ownership and Decision Making on Perceived and Desired Patterns of Organizational Influence: A Longitudinal Study’, Human Relations, 34(10), 847-876.
Long, R. (1982), ‘Worker Ownership and Job Attitudes: A Field Study’, Industrial Relations, 21(2), 196-215.
Rosen, C. & Quarrey, M. (1997), ‘How Well is Employee Ownership Working?’, in Kerr, S. (ed.), Ultimate Rewards, Harvard Business School Press, ch.4 (43-50).
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admin
626 Posts |
Posted - 13 Mar 2009 : 09:39:30
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Governance and Employee Voice
The following report is highly recommended for the company practices which are detailed in the section "Governance and Employee Voice"
'Making employee ownership work’ is a new guide from the Employee Ownership Association (EOA) UK and co-ownership advisers the Baxi Partnership, based on a survey of 25 EOA member companies including John Lewis, Unipart, Arup and Mott MacDonald. Designed for easy reference, the guide compares company practice under five headings: employee engagement, management systems and reward, governance and employee voice, employee ownership culture, and ethics and social responsibility.
The author of the report is Sarah Silcox. It was published in February 2009 and can be accessed at: http://www.employeeownership.co.uk/publications.asp.
About the research
The report is designed to help co-owned companies get more from the employee ownership advantage. It compares how 25 co-owned companies handle key performance issues such as employee engagement, reward, governance, culture, and social responsibility - that is, how the co-owned organisations actually managed the “people” aspects of employee ownership.
The purpose of the research is to provide member companies with benchmark information through examining the following areas:
• Employee engagement: securing employee engagement; informing and involving employees in strategic decision-making; giving employees an input into improving their jobs and working environments;
• Management systems and reward: using employee ownership (EO) in recruitment; reflecting EO in performance management; financial benefits for employees from co-ownership; separate incentives for managers and other groups;
• Governance and employee voice: formal employee representation structures; employee representation on boards; induction and training for employee representatives; and the role of employees in selecting managers;
• Employee ownership culture: ways of fostering an involved culture; most effective channels for internal communication; promoting EO to clients, customers and suppliers; and
• Ethics and social responsibility: corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies; core values and principles; encouraging employees to get involved in CSR activities; budgets and separate charitable trusts; CSR decision-making.
Participants were also asked to give “do’s” and “don’ts” under each of the above five themes.
Organisations were also asked to provide documentation in support of their responses (for example, written constitutions, remits for employee representation bodies, and sets of core values.
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admin
626 Posts |
Posted - 24 Mar 2009 : 09:38:55
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Workplace Democracy in an Era of Global Economic Crisis
Kingsley Laffer Memorial Lecture by Professor Russell Lansbury
(Sydney University, 16th March 2009)
The global financial crisis provides an opportunity for Australia to undertake reforms which will create a more democratic workplace. This will require a new social settlement between government, employers and unions which not only restores and extends collective bargaining rights but also strengthens workers' legal rights to participate in decision-making at the enterprise level. In the global era, Australia should also play a more active role in supporting efforts by international bodies, such as the ILO, to promote decent jobs which embody core labour standards. This paper examines recent Australian and international experience as well as outlining future challenges for workplace democracy.
Link to the full paper:
http://www.econ.usyd.edu.au/news_and_events/laffer_lecture
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admin
626 Posts |
Posted - 31 May 2009 : 11:14:08
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Corporate Australia needs to improve employee participation practices if it wants to increase productivity.
The latest report from the ESOP Research Project at the University of Melbourne's Law School - “Broad-based Employee Share Ownership in Australian Listed Companies: Survey Report”, April, 2009, provides interesting data on what Corporate Australia makes of ESOPs as a mechanism for increasing productivity.
The research report is based on a survey sent to 1711 ASX listed companies. 419 companies completed ‘Part A’ of the report, a response rate of 24%. Of these, 238 companies were eligible to complete ‘Part B’ of the report (on broad-based plan practices), but only 139 did so. The results detailed in the report are based on the data supplied by these 139 companies (a fairly large sample).
Of the companies responding, one third (34.5%) were in the mining industry (reflecting almost exactly the make-up of the ASX), 12.5% were in finance and insurance and 8.9% in manufacturing. 56.5% of the companies had turnovers of less than $20 million (and employed fewer than 50 employees) while 23.2% had turnovers of $100 million or more (and employed 1000 employees or more). 60% of the companies employed more than 90% of their staff on a full-time basis. Nearly all plans were open to all full-time staff, with 62% also being open to permanent part-time staff, 13% to independent contractors and 10% to casual staff. 57% of the respondents had a broad-based plan (or plans), 33.2% had none and 10% had one previously. Significantly more companies reported having a broad-based plan than a narrow-based plan (ie: a plan open only to executives). The adoption of broad-based plans is also relatively new, with over three quarters having introduced the plan since 2000 – 77.1% since 2000, 21.4% in the 90s and only 1.2% between 1982 and 1989.
The results provide some added weight to the AEOA agenda on better enabling “broad and deep’ employee share ownership within companies in Australia. The results also suggest that policy development in certain areas needs to be undertaken, especially in the critical practice areas of extending ESO to the lower paid and encouraging employee participation to boost productivity.
Three quarters of companies viewed ESOPs as a means of encouraging increased productivity. This was interesting given the absence of any convincing evidence of a direct link between the broad-based ESOPs and productivity. While companies with broad-based plans were significantly more likely to have structures for communicating directly with employees, the findings suggested that the existence of an ESOP does not automatically lead to increased employee participation in corporate or workplace level decision-making.
International studies have shown that it is the link between employee share ownership and employee participation that generates the productivity impact. Without this occurring in Australia, the case for employee share ownership built on ‘increasing productivity’ is problematical.
Respondents were asked which of a number of employee participation practices were used within their company. 39 percent of companies had a formal structure for sharing company information with employees and 35 percent of companies had a formal structure for communication between all levels of employees and management (eg: employee surveys). Over a quarter of companies (27.3 percent) reported that their company had a joint committee of managers and employees primarily concerned with consultation: for example, a joint consultative committee (JCC). Only 4.9 percent of companies in the sample offered business literacy training to their employees.
Over one third of companies (37.2 percent) in the sample employed none of the above employee participation practices.
Respondents were also asked to indicate the extent to which employee shareholders were involved in corporate decision-making. In the majority of companies (72.4 percent), employee shareholders enjoyed the same voting rights as ordinary shareholders. Very few companies showed any form of innovation in terms of collective representation of employee shareholders, eg: employee board representation etc. Just over 17 percent of companies indicated that employee shareholders were involved in corporate decision-making through ‘other’ mechanisms. The survey instrument did not provide them with an opportunity to specify what ‘other’ mechanisms these included.
The study is the first to examine the extent of employee involvement in the design and administration of ESOPs in Australia. The study found that broad-based employee share ownership in ASX-listed companies is overwhelmingly a management initiated and driven phenomenon. Employees and/or their representatives are rarely involved in decisions relating to the introduction of a plan or its design and administration, with only one in five companies having any consultation at all in the design, implementation or administration of their share plans.
The full report can be seen at: http://cclsr.law.unimelb.edu.au/index.cfm?objectid=A9840D89-1422-207C-BA2319347B2EE439 .
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admin
626 Posts |
Posted - 31 Dec 2009 : 03:40:35
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Working better: Employee participation, decisionmaking and outcomes
One of the most common concerns about both employee ownership and participative management is that of losing control. This concern is often the result of failing to distinguish between different types of control. The type most people have in mind is control over decisions. The type of control most managers really need to maximize, however, is control over outcomes. While employee ownership and participation can reduce a manager’s control over decisions, they can greatly enhance control over outcomes.
The Old Model of Control
In traditional business organizations, managers tell people what to do, and, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and effectiveness, they do it. Managers are not expected to waste their time seeking employee ideas and information. Decision making control is maximized. This model of management borrows heavily from the bureaucratic-military model developed around the time of the industrial revolution. It worked very well for organizations in which tasks could be efficiently segmented and routinised, in which markets and technologies changed slowly, and in which product cycles were very long.
This model is increasingly dysfunctional in an economy in which technology changes at extraordinary speed, product life cycles are shorter and shorter, information is highly distributed throughout the organization, and markets are segmented into ever multiplying micro-markets, each with their own particular demands. Survival in this market depends on all the management cliches: listening to the customer; moving to the technological edge; speeding product development and introduction; tapping the knowledge of anyone with something to contribute.
The reasons are intuitively clear. Today’s successful businesses succeed because they can receive, process, and act on information more quickly and effectively than competitors. Those who fail to take advantage of better knowledge of customer needs will find they have fewer customers; those who fail to learn about a more efficient way to make a product will make fewer products. Certainly these things were always true, but until the rise of the information age, businesses had more time to catch up to change; now change proceeds so quickly, time is a critical resource, not a luxury.
The New Model of Control
This changed environment requires a different kind of control: control over outcomes. The manager who could just tell people what to do, not worrying about what employees might think, cannot maximize control over outcomes for the very simple reason that this benighted manager is lacking what could be essential information. The ESOP manager who has sat in on an employee participation group meeting, for instance, has gained information on customer attitudes and concerns, maintenance problems, logjams in supply and dozens of other large and small matters.
Some of this information would eventually have made its way up the ladder through written reports, employee comments, and data analyses, but even most of that would have moved more slowly. Much of it simply would have evaporated. Employees may forget to raise an issue, may not see the relevance of raising a concern, may fear making a criticism or see no point in making a suggestion, or lack the information, training, and framework within which to translate day-to-day experiences into useful management information.
Creating a process in which employees can overcome all these obstacles is difficult and time consuming. It inevitably means more management time is spent listening, more non management time talking, and more company resources on training. It also means that management must regularly accept employee input, even to the point of taking risks on employee ideas that management might not believe are the best ones. Absent this willingness, employees will become discouraged, seeing no difference in the “new” system.
This does not mean management cedes decision-making control. Instead, it means management restrict the number of decisions it makes alone to those where it has unique experience or judgment, seeks more input in to decisions where others have valuable insights, and lets other people decide when their expertise or judgment is superior, even if their title is not. The result is better decisions and more time to focus on those areas where only management is in a position to make a good decision. In short, it helps management have more control over its environment by being better informed and having more time to focus on those things it does particularly well.
This process also increases the willingness of people to respond to management directives. Decisions made without input from anyone are often resisted or carried out without enthusiasm. So the ultimate outcome - making something happen - is more likely when control is shared.
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Employee Ownership and Employee Participation
