NCEO Annual Conference: Improving Ownership Culture in Ways Large and Small

At the end of April, the NCEO hosted its 2024 Annual Conference in Tampa, Florida—a real highlight of my year.

This was a jam-packed event buzzing with energy and excitement from the attendees. After reconnecting with past acquaintances, meeting new people from other employee-owned companies, and gaining countless ideas for increased engagement and culture, you may feel unsure of where to start once you return home. This experience is not exclusive to the Annual Conference; in fact, it may occur after other meetings and training sessions.

So, how do you take all the great information and ideas back to your company after an event? And why does it matter? First, bringing back lessons enhances your ability to influence your company’s growth and also solidifies the value of conferences in general, which could impact your company’s decisions around attending future events. This article will help you synthesize your conference takeaways, as well as share some concrete ideas from our Tampa event.

Top three takeaways

Begin by taking some time to reflect on the recent experience and the sessions you attended as well as the people you met. What were your top three takeaways? Takeaways, in this instance, are higher-level themes that require some action to improve, although they can also include areas where you are doing really well. It’s easy to over-focus on improvement, which can overshadow current strengths that can and should be reinforced. It’s important to acknowledge these strengths and any progress that has been made. Regardless, your top three takeaways may not be specific and discrete ideas. Some examples of themes and takeaways are:

• Financial literacy is a challenge for the majority of Americans, and ESOPs have an opportunity to bridge this gap by providing more concrete education for employee-owners.
• Employee ownership can and should be built into existing structures and meetings at the company. This can include everything from team huddles and company meetings to adding information to paychecks and on employee portals.
• Language matters in how you communicate and how you present ideas. Simple changes like adding “employee-owner” to email signatures and business cards can be impactful to both employees and external contacts.

Another approach is to think in terms of the magnitude of the takeaway, like small wins, big ideas, and current company practices to reinforce. The small wins are low-hanging fruit, things that can be implemented with minimal effort and still provide a high impact and return. Big ideas are more involved, the things you want to work toward that require advanced planning to build the steps toward your goal. Lastly, taking existing content, programs, and activities, assess how these can be augmented, or taken to the next level, for greater impact.

One example of how to augment current company practices comes from employee-owned CT3 and their presentation “Who Says Educators Can’t Be Owners?” For this session, they created a helpful rubric for employee engagement that illustrates how you can take concepts and establish what a “basic,” “standard,” and “plus” level of engagement looks like at your company. Taking this rubric concept, look at recent activities you’ve done and set expectations for the next time.

Small wins

Employee appreciation day happens the first Friday in March (mark your calendars for next year—March 7, 2025). One easy idea here is to mark this as “Owner Appreciation Day” and use that as an opportunity to celebrate your employee-owners.

Employee Ownership Month (EOM) in October is an excellent opportunity to increase engagement at your company. Using raffles with giveaways from other employee-owned companies can foster increased participation in activities during EOM while also highlighting products from other EO companies.

Part of building an ownership mindset is about highlighting how individual actions impact collective outcomes—finding ways that small savings can add up over the course of a year can be helpful in connecting employee-owner actions to the bottom line and therefore benefiting their colleagues. This will look different at every company depending on industry, style of work, and more.

Big ideas

• Launching a company podcast can be an effective way to connect with employee-owners, especially in a decentralized workplace. ESOP-owned Sargent presented a session about creating a podcast, while recording a podcast episode that can be heard here.
• Creating a Shark Tank-like program can be a unique way to solicit creative ideas from employee-owners. The theme could be around the biggest cost savings idea or getting new business through new products, contracts, etc.
• Incorporate employee ownership in external communications, including on your website, social media, and press releases. The conference session on How to Effectively Write and Speak About Employee Ownership demonstrated the importance of storytelling and created best practices resources that can be found here.

Debrief

After reflecting on your key takeaways and jotting down ideas for easy wins and big ideas, it’s also a good idea to schedule time to debrief about the conference. There are different ways to approach this, and again it could require a few meetings. For example, if multiple people from your company attended, get together to share ideas and develop a cohesive point of view on what next steps to take.

Other ideas include scheduling time with your communications or culture committee, if you have one, to again review and brainstorm the ideas and start to establish a plan for implementation.

The last group to consider is leadership—either company leadership or your department leaders. This can be an effective way to highlight the value you received from attending the conference and create a lasting ripple effect for your company.