Employee ownership provides a lot of benefits to employees, communities, and companies, but one of the less discussed but most important features of employee ownership is that it allows companies to focus on long-term goals and values, not the short-term goals of public company shareholders or private equity firm buyers. Black & Veatch is the 10th-largest majority ESOP-owned company and the 12th-largest engineering company (in fact, 7 of the top 20 are employee-owned, and 6 are NCEO members). Recently, it made a major decision to focus on sustainable energy products and move away from any coal-related projects.
Black & Veatch was in the news earlier this year for its support of innovation in the face of the pandemic. This time, it's committing to fighting climate change, announcing that it will be withdrawing from design, power, and construction that is reliant on coal. It will instead be putting resources toward renewable and sustainable forms of energy, with a goal of reducing its industry’s overall carbon footprint. Speaking on the impetus for such a bold move, Black & Veatch’s power business president Mario Azar highlighted the freedom the ESOP provided to do what the company saw as the right thing. “We are an employee-owned company, and we do not make decisions based on what the market wants to hear, or how the market will react,” said Azar in an interview with Powermag.com. “It’s really centered around our values and our future. It was us, telling ourselves, did we really want to be part of that [coal] legacy anymore?”
The tenets of Black & Veatch's sustainability plan (taken from this article) are: