UK Study on Employee Ownership and Well-Being

A study of 1,000 employees at employee-owned businesses in the United Kingdom examined measures of well-being and health. The authors, Professor Ronald McQuaid, Dr Emma Hollywood, Sue Bond, Dr Jesus Canduela, Alec Richard and Gemma Blackledge, found a "very high level of wellbeing and satisfaction across a range of issues in all of the organisations in the survey." They noted that these "results are consistently more positive for the [companies] surveyed than the UK workforce as a whole." The study was carried out at Edinburgh Napier University's Employment Research Institute and was commissioned by the UK's Employee Ownership Association. It gathered data from eight diverse employee-owned companies using surveys and interviews, and then compared the results to various national samples of the UK workforce.

The employee-owners reported higher levels of job satisfaction, especially in comparison to non-employee-owned companies where they had worked before. Respondents were far more likely than average to feel that managers respond to their suggestions, and they reported a higher degree of control over their work: 53% of the employee-owners reported "a lot" of control over their work, versus 36% in the 2004 Workplace Employee Relations Survey, which surveyed a representative sample of the UK work force. While 46% of employee-owners agree that working for an employee-owned company is better for their health and wellbeing (versus 14% who disagree), actual measures of health were essentially the same for the employee-owners and the non-employee-owners.