| Leading Companies Online Magazine
The Employee Ownership Annual Conference Helps n-Link Determine its Strategy for Employee Involvement
By Emily Meyertholen, Beyster Institute Staff
  Around 700 people attend the Employee Ownership Conference each year, including business owners and executives from companies who are involved in or interested in employee ownership, experts and service providers such as consultants and lawyers, and managers and employees from employee-owned companies. Because the conference covers everything from technical issues to employee ownership culture, all of these people have much to gain from attending.
For Sandra Green, founder and CEO of the IT and engineering services company n-Link, the conference has provided steady guidance and inspiration throughout the development of the company’s employee ownership plan. The company made its first ESOP contribution in 1999 and has steadily contributed to the ESOP, adding a Key Effort Stock Option Plan, and then converting it to the Key Effort Phantom Stock Plan. The plan is to provide for 95 percent employee ownership over time. Currently, 20 percent of the company is owned by the ESOP.
“When I went to the conference early on, I was trying to get a handle on what this ESOP thing was all about. I felt like I was in over my head.” Contacts she made at those first few conferences directed her to the professionals who helped her determine the right plan and put it in motion. “I had met people who had spent enormous amounts of money trying to get a plan in place. At the conference I was able to meet people who referred me to the expert consultants who were able to set it up without this enormous expense and fairly easily. At a cost of only $15,000, we put our ESOP and KESOP plans in place. This was very affordable given that our revenue was much more modest at the time.”
Sandra has attended the conference almost every year since 1998, bringing with her between six and 12 other employees. Managers and members of the company’s ESOP committee are required to attend.
“It’s critical for our executive management to really understand what we’re trying to do, not only so they can be an example, but so they can answer employee questions and be a part of the culture. Also, it transfers some of the accountability for the employee ownership program to management, because I can’t be the only one responsible for it. I think the biggest lesson I’ve learned is that it’s critical to get leadership to understand employee ownership – not just to talk it, but to live it. It emanates from the CEO down to the next layer and the next layer. The conference is an important part of making that happen because it allows senior leadership to learn from the senior leadership in other companies, and employee owners to learn from other employee owners. I try to have an employee from each field location attend so they can be an expert to the other employee owners when some substantive discussions may occur from our outlying office locations on what employee ownership is all about.”
At one of Sandra’s most memorable conference sessions, a human resources professional from an employee-owned company recommended “The Accounting Game,” an exercise based on the book by Darrell Mullis and Judith Orloff, as a tool for getting employees involved in and knowledgeable about their company’s finances. “Most of our employees are programmers, so this type of accounting game in the form of a lemonade stand business did not go over well when we announced it as part of The Employee Annual Meeting (TEAM) event,” says Sandra. “Turns out, the game was so much fun that everyone was scribbling to come up with the income statement and balance sheet results after several ‘lemonade stand’ transactions were described. Everyone was really into it. The timing was great – it was the day before we unveiled our income statement and balance sheet for the fourth year. This time, everyone was fully engaged and asked great questions. It was like a night and day difference.”
“I look forward to the conference every year,” says Sandra. “Over the years I became more educated and more interested in the critical aspects, such as the implications of being a trustee. The two most important things the conference has provided for me are an excellent contact network and new techniques from other companies which our management and employee owner committee can consider applying at n-Link. I like the focus on actual companies and how they got where they are, along with examples of their trials and tribulations while implementing employee ownership and employee ownership thinking. Experts are needed, but from a cultural standpoint, you need to hear about other companies’ experiences to change that paradigm of clocking in and clocking out, making people engaged and thinking like owners.”
“I think we’ve finally got the right culture permeated throughout the company,” says Sandra. “I don’t attribute it to the ESOP itself, but rather all the things that go with it when leadership believes in it and creates that culture, such as the sharing of information and the respect among employees.”
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