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Employee Ownership Blog
Nancy Wiefek




Nancy Wiefek

New Research on Employee Ownership and the Pandemic

The pandemic is a critically important time to conduct research exploring how businesses and their employees have fared, and what are successful ways to reduce the negative impacts from this crisis. Employee ownership is a key factor to be explored in this context. The challenge has always been collecting comparison data on companies without employee ownership. With funding from the Employee Ownership Foundation, scholars at Rutgers University’s Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing recently took on this challenge working with the national survey firm, SSRS.  



Nancy Wiefek

Survey Data Shows Lower Turnover Among ESOPs

Our recent ESOP Topics Survey gathered data from 160 ESOP companies on how they’re handling the COVID-19 crisis and other issues, including questions about their turnover rates in 2019. The surveyed ESOP companies reported dramatically lower turnover than overall national averages.  This difference persisted at the industry level in each of the industries with enough data to make comparisons: wholesale trade, manufacturing, and construction ESOP companies had turnover rates less than half of national averages for their industry. See tables below for details (national data is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)