Three months ago we launched Employee-Owned Jobs, the first and only job board for employee-owned companies. We were guided by a vision to bring together companies building broad-base prosperity and job seekers who want to become employee-owners. We expected excitement from the employee ownership community, but we’ve been blown away by the response. In roughly three months, we’ve had over 19,000 users and the positive feedback from our Members has been tremendous.
This blog post shares more about our vision to connect job seekers and employee-owned companies. We’ll cover:
- The Advantages of Becoming An Employee-Owner
- Great Hires Amplify Ownership Culture
- Stronger Together: Building Support For Employee Ownership
Own Your Job: The Advantages of Becoming An Employee-Owner
The promise of employee ownership is simple: if you work for a good company and put your time in, you will be treated well. First and foremost, there’s the opportunity to build life-changing wealth. Looking across our Members, employee-owners tend to receive an allocation of company stock between 5% - 15% of their annual salary. The benefit increases the more they make, but the average value is around $5,000 a year. Stock allocations cost employee-owners nothing and generally come on top of the usual benefits.
Employee-owners also see increased job stability and career growth. Companies exist to benefit their owners, so a company that is owned by its employees is going to approach big decisions a bit differently. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, employee-owned firms were three times more likely to retain staff. We also see companies investing in their employee-owners with training and education. Finally, many employee-owned businesses prefer to grow leadership through internal promotion, opening career pathways for entry-level workers.
Perhaps the most immediate benefit of working at an employee-owned company is being a part of an ownership culture. Broad-based ownership creates alignment up and down a company. It increases engagement, strengthens bonds, deepens relationships, and creates an elevated sense of accountability. The result is a more motivated and effective team working together towards a common goal. Best of all, it’s a benefit that a new employee experiences the first day they walk in the door.
If the benefits of employee ownership sound good to you, you’re not alone. In nationally representative opinion surveys, we’ve found that 3 out of 10 job seekers would be more likely to apply to a job if they learned the company is employee-owned. But there’s an issue: how would you go about finding a job at an employee-owned company? Employee-Owned Jobs solves this issue by aggregating over 9,000 open positions, making it easy to become an employee-owner.
Great Hires Supercharge Ownership Culture
Hiring great people can strengthen a company’s culture and create a tremendous competitive advantage. Engaged employees put in more effort, are better team members, and care more about the customer. A recent meta-analysis from Gallup found that teams scoring in the top quartile on engagement had 10% higher customer loyalty, 23% higher profitability, and 18% lower turnover.
Hiring great employee-owners creates a positive feedback cycle that supercharges engagement. Motivated new hires will put more energy into getting up to speed, will be less likely to leave in the crucial ramp-up period, and will be faster to understand the benefits of employee ownership. The energy they bring will boost culture, which in turn will make it easier to attract more of the right candidates.
Employee-owned jobs is the best way to tap into an applicant pool that is excited about employee ownership. Users find us through a variety of channels. Maybe they have already worked at an employee-owned company. Perhaps they know someone who has benefited from an ESOP. Or maybe the idea just strikes a cord deep inside. Whatever the case, the pull is real: in the first three months we’ve had over 19,000 users and we’re just getting started with our promotion.
Stronger Together: Building Support For Employee Ownership
Making it easy to hire great employee-owners is the next step towards our vision of building an employee-owned economy. Over the past six years we’ve grown our network to 600+ Members and a simple theme has emerged: we’re stronger together. Companies do a great job talking about employee ownership on their careers pages, in interviews, and on job offers. But what has been missing is a comprehensive effort to drive massive awareness and interest.
With Employee-Owned Jobs, we’re able to mount this campaign. We’ve begun by promoting EO Jobs within the employee ownership community. In Q4, we will begin outreach to 1,462 community colleges and 7,271 trade schools across the United States. We will equip career centers with resources to share the advantages of employee ownership, we will participate in webinars, and we will drive massive interest in becoming an employee-owner.
