In the News: Educating Workers about Employee Ownership

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"Instead of continuing to simply pass out stock statements once a year, company executives set out to promote the program and educate workers about ownership. An employee committee has rolled out a series of campaigns, with catchy slogans and giveaways, to raise awareness of stock ownership and to get workers thinking about what each of them as owners can do to raise the price of company stock -- and how it affects their own net worth."

Van Meter also created an employee committee to “educate people on what each of them could do to raise the stock price -- and how that affected their own net worth.” Their stock was up 78% in 2006 and employee turnover dropped from 18% to 8%, which management believes is “directly correlated to employees' engagement and commitment.” Some of the initiatives implemented include:

• Creating an employee committee
• Removing management from the education process
• Providing new ESOP participants with a special “I am in” jacket and education on the plan
• Using creative ways to describe the benefits of the ESOP such as "Work 10 (years), get five free.” They also compared the size of the company’s contribution to the ESOP as “about 9 ½ weeks of pay.”