BL Companies Director of Recruitment and Talent Management Bret Boudreaux was a recent guest of the Human Capital Leadership podcast with Dr. Jonathan H. Westover. The discussion centered around employee ownership and what that means, not only to BL Companies but for other firms who either have an ESOP or are exploring that possibility. As Bret says in the episode, at its core employee ownership is just a structure of a business, one that BL transitioned to almost 20 years ago. But the biggest benefit is in the culture this can help foster, when only current employees are shareholders and an incentive structure is in place for people to work hard for each other and for themselves to create a long-term financial benefit in addition to a great place to work on a day-to-day basis. Here is an excerpt:
“People don’t want to feel like they’re just a cog in some faceless machine. The old joke of, well, I come and I punch my clock and then I go home. That’s not the reality of where we work nowadays. Work and life, we’re all kind of integrated. People want to feel like they’re having an impact in the work they’re doing, and the work they’re doing is meaningful and contributing to something larger. And so for us as an employee-owned company — there are challenges with running an employee-owned company because there has to be intentionality around it. There has to be transparency. There has to be communication. It doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. It’s not a set-it-and-forget-it model and it just goes. Because you want everybody engaged, and engagement leads to success. So you can’t have the metric be the outcome.”
Listen to the full episode here, or wherever you get your podcasts.