Employee Ownership Blog

How can you find out if employee-owners understand the technical aspects of your ESOP? The NCEO has developed the Know Your ESOP Quiz, a 10-item questionnaire that measures employees' understanding of important aspects of how ESOPs work.

The ups and (mostly) downs of Facebook's stock following its IPO have generated countless articles and commentaries, but another angle of the story is the taxation of the company's broad-based equity compensation plan.

Both private equity and ESOPs often use equity to change ownership patterns, often with the goal of creating more efficient companies.

The NCEO is looking for documents and tools companies are using to create and sustain effective communication with their employee-owners.

About one in three Americans aged 18 to 34 said that they plan to transfer investments out of stock and into money market and savings accounts, saying that they expect to "sit on the sidelines" in the next six months. By contrast, only 11% of older Americans expect to do the same.

The School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University announced the names of the 22 new research fellows who will be studying broad-based employee stock ownership and profit sharing as part

The NCEO will unveil its 2012 list of the 100 largest majority employee-owned companies in the United States in its upcoming July-August newsletter. Should your company be on that list?

Employee ownership plans are often one of the largest blocs of ownership in public companies, almost always through ESOPs or 401(k) plans. Traditionally, employees have either not voted their shares at all or supported management.

Schneider Electric, a 130,000-employee multinational company, is offering employees an opportunity to borrow money to buy shares. The loans come from a bank, but the arrangements were made by the company. For each share an employee buys, nine more are purchased on the employee's behalf.

Over 100 foreign-owned companies in Zimbabwe have set up government-approved plans to share between 5% and 28% of their equity through employee stock ownership trusts that accumulate shares over an employee's tenure with the firm and pay out when they leave.

The House Ways and Means Committee heard testimony on April 17 about the current system of retirement tax incentives. The five witnesses all suggested that eliminating the current tax incentives would weaken the state of retirement security.

Over a thousand people attended the 2012 Employee Ownership Conference sponsored by the NCEO and the Beyster Institute last week in Minneapolis.