Shifting Culture to Advance Employee Ownership

<div class="header alignfull header--article has-background has-tonal-black-background-color"> <div class="header__layout"> <div class="header__content"> <div class="header__metadata"><div class="header__metas"><div class="header__meta header__meta--taxonomy header__meta--tax-category"> Videos</div></div></div> <h1 class="header__title">Archives</h1> <div class="header__metadata"><div class="header__metas"><div class="favorite-block"> <button class="favorite" data-id="226445" data-state="" title="Favorites are not currently available" disabled><span class="favorite__on">Unfavorite</span><span class="favorite__off">Favorite</span><svg class="svg svg--svg-assets-svg-icon-bookmark" role="img" height="15" width="11"><use xlink:href="#svg-assets-svg-icon-bookmark" /></svg></button></div> <div class="header__meta header__meta--date"> June 3, 2026</div> <div class="header__meta header__meta--taxonomy header__meta--tax-program_tax"> Economic Opportunities Program</div></div></div> </div> </div> <figure class="header__media" role="presentation"> </figure> </div> <div class="wp-block-group alignfull is-style-contour-lines is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained" style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;padding-top:var(--wp--preset--spacing--medium);padding-bottom:var(--wp--preset--spacing--medium)"> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Shifting Culture to Advance Employee Ownership" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MlX5-h5wISU?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <div class="wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex wp-container-core-buttons-is-layout-a89b3969 wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-button"><a class="wp-block-button__link wp-element-button" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlX5-h5wISU">Watch Video<span class="wp-block-button__effect"></span></a></div> </div> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/> <h2 class="wp-block-heading has-h4-variant" id="h-description">Description</h2> <p class="">Culture is an essential cornerstone that determines whether employee ownership translates into strong business outcomes and high quality jobs. This session explores the mindset shift required to move from passive participation to a vibrant culture of ownership, as well as the cultural shift required societally to prioritize worker ownership and economic empowerment. Panelists discuss how a strong internal culture of ownership protects the dignity of work in an automated age and serves as a powerful competitive advantage, while also exploring the changes required to shift our economy towards a new understanding of ownership and profit distribution.</p> <p class="">This video comes from the <a href="https://www.aspeninstitute.org/events/employee-ownership-ideas-forum-2026/">2026 Employee Ownership Ideas Forum</a>, which took place on June 2-3, 2026, in Washington DC and online.</p> <p class="">For more videos from the Forum, <a href="https://www.aspeninstitute.org/events/employee-ownership-ideas-forum-2026/">visit our event page</a> or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@aspeneop">subscribe to our YouTube channel</a>.</p> <p class="">And <a href="https://pod.link/1503944129">subscribe to our podcast</a> to listen on the go.</p> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/> <h2 id="speakers" class="wp-block-heading has-h4-variant">Speakers</h2> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li class="">Evan Edwards, CEO and President, Project Equity</li> <li class="">Melissa Hoover, Director of Ownership Culture, Apis &amp; Heritage</li> <li class="">Chris Mackin, Founder, Ownership Associates, Partner, American Working Capital</li> <li class="">Anna-Lisa Miller, Executive Director, Ownership Works</li> <li class="">Adria Scharf (moderator), Assistant Professor, Senior Associate Director, Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing, Director of the Curriculum Library for Employee Ownership, Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations</li> </ul> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/> <h2 id="resources" class="wp-block-heading has-h4-variant">Resources</h2> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li class="">Case study: <a href="https://eohub.rutgers.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Case-Study-AH-Legacy-Fund-I_Rutgers-Final.pdf">Apis &amp; Heritage Legacy Fund I: Private credit fund invests in employee ownership for essential workers</a>&nbsp;</li> <li class="">Op-Ed: <a href="https://fortune.com/2026/04/11/ingersoll-rand-ceo-lesson-giving-employees-share-ownership/">Ingersoll Rand CEO: here’s how employee ownership helped drive more than 8x enterprise value growth</a>&nbsp;</li> <li class="">Video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wg2bkg8WUtQ">Ownership Works – CoolIT&#8217;s Tete Ester Francis on What Employee Ownership Means for Her Family</a></li> <li class="">Website: <a href="https://www.apisheritage.com/home">Apis &amp; Heritage Capital Partners</a></li> <li class="">Website: <a href="https://ownershipassociates.com/main-landing/">Ownership Associates</a>&nbsp;</li> <li class="">Website: <a href="https://ownershipworks.org/employee-ownership-models/">Ownership Works — Employee Ownership Models</a></li> <li class="">Website: <a href="https://ownershipworks.org/our-impact/">Ownership Works — Our Impact</a></li> <li class="">Website: <a href="https://project-equity.org/">Project Equity</a>&nbsp;</li> </ul> <div class="panels"> <div class="panels__panel"> <div class="panels__header"> <h2 class="panels__title has-h4-variant"> <button class="panels__toggle" type="button" id="transcript" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="panel-transcript"> <span class="panels__toggle-text">Transcript</span> <span class="panels__toggle-icon"></span> </button> </h2> </div> <div class="panels__content" id="panel-transcript" role="region" aria-labelledby="transcript"> <div class="panels__content-inner"> <p class="">[00:00:05] Matt: Shifting to this panel, Shifting Culture to Advance Employee Ownership, this one&#8217;s something I&#8217;ve been looking forward to. There&#8217;s a lot of talk about scaling finance, and I think what we&#8217;re hearing over the last two days is, well, how are we going to scale the culture that needs to go along with this opportunity to create more employee-owned companies? This panel&#8217;s going to dive into culture, small c, big C. Culture inside companies, but also the other places we need to shift culture. Like in the world of finance, in the world of business advising, in universities, maybe in labor unions, and in society at large. It&#8217;s going to cover a lot of ground.</p> <p class="">Some of my favorite people in this space on this panel, people I really admire. Starting on the far right there, we have Anna-Lisa Miller, Executive Director of Ownership Works. Next to Anna-Lisa, we have Chris Mackin, founder, Ownership Associates, partner, American Working Capital. Definitely an employee ownership Hall of Fame, I believe. Melissa Hoover, also in the Hall of Fame, Director of Ownership Culture, Apis &amp; Heritage. Moderating today, Adria Scharf from Rutgers University. I&#8217;ll turn it over to you, Adria. Thanks. Oh, did I skip over Evan? Sorry. Evan Edwards, CEO and President, Project Equity. Another Hall of Famer. I should not have missed him. Thank you.</p> <p class="">[applause]</p> <p class="">[00:01:26] Adria Scharf: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you, Matt. I&#8217;m Adria Scharf. I&#8217;m part of the leadership team at the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing. As Matt shared, we are going to turn, in the coming hour or so, to the topic of culture, of shifting culture to advance employee ownership. I really feel like this year, more than any previous Ideas Forum, the theme of culture shifting culture has really surfaced throughout, both yesterday and today. Today with Ginny&#8217;s big idea, and Paula D&#8217;Ambrosa opening the day with storytelling, and we need to connect our movement to the American dream.</p> <p class="">Yesterday&#8217;s opening panel of worker owners talked a lot about the meaning of ownership, et cetera. These ideas have surfaced throughout the two days. We are going to do a deep dive and really wrestle with this idea of culture. At different levels, we&#8217;re going to talk both about culture on the shop floor, on the office floor, within worker-owned organizations, but also much more macro, much more broadly in terms of American narrative, et cetera. Matt already introduced our incredibly esteemed panel of four incredible field leaders with very diverse perspectives. I think we&#8217;ll have a wide-ranging, maybe freewheeling conversation.</p> <p class="">We&#8217;ll start with panelist introductions. Could you each tell us a little about yourself, your organization, and just how you define or think about organizational culture? Chris Mackin, let&#8217;s begin with you. Yes, sir.</p> <p class="">[00:03:04] Chris Mackin: Oh, wow. Okay. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for putting this wonderful meeting together, Rutgers and Aspen. My name is Chris Mackin. I wear three professional hats. I&#8217;m the founder of a company called Ownership Associates, which was an early pioneer in the after-the-transaction training and education in corporate governance world. That&#8217;s primarily the hat I&#8217;m speaking with today. As was mentioned, I&#8217;m a partner at American Working Capital, which is a merchant bank that&#8217;s been very active in financing larger middle-market ESOP transactions for several years.</p> <p class="">I&#8217;m a senior fellow at the Rutgers Institute for Employee Ownership, where I have taught full-semester course on employee ownership for many years. Not now, but I have in the past, and continue to support that moderate in Oxford conference that they do. I&#8217;m a practitioner and an academic, I guess is the best thing I could say. I also have been involved in policy, in the American Ownership and Resilience Act, which I think we&#8217;ll talk about. In terms of, you&#8217;re asking about culture. That was the academic question that brought me into this field in the late &#8217;70s, early &#8217;80s.</p> <p class="">I started in this field in 1978 before there were ESOPs. My thesis that I wrote at Harvard is called, <em>The</em> <em>Social</em> <em>Psychology</em> <em>of</em> <em>Ownership:</em> <em>A</em> <em>Case</em> <em>Study</em> <em>of</em> <em>a</em> <em>Democratically</em> <em>Owned</em> <em>Firm.</em> My endeavor there was to unpack this particularly rich and deep and multidimensional concept of ownership, which can easily be just partially grasped by people who might look at it just as a form of compensation, might look at it just as a benefit plan, might look at it as an investment thesis. I think the core idea for me always is what it means for people and what it means for organizations and voice.</p> <p class="">With my early partners, Fred Freundlich and Loren Rodgers, who was with me for many years, we developed curricula that unpacked particularly the value dimension of ownership. That what we mean by ownership has something to do with a balance between the rights and responsibilities of ownership and the risks and rewards of ownership. These are like interior moral value concepts of the ownership idea. That a healthy ownership culture has something to do with figuring out how to find a balance between those things, because if your culture is too heavy on the rights and not heavy enough on responsibilities, or too heavy on rewards and not on risks, you&#8217;re in trouble.</p> <p class="">You have to find a way to achieve that balance. You ideally need to find a way to engage with rank-and-file employees and managers about those ideas, and get them talking to each other about it. We have curricula products. United Airlines bought it, others over the years. I&#8217;ll be glad to talk more about that as we go on.</p> <p class="">[00:06:19] Adria Scharf: Definitely, we&#8217;ll return to that. Thank you, Chris. Anna-Lisa.</p> <p class="">[00:06:22] Anna-Lisa Miller: Sure. Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me. It&#8217;s such a pleasure to be here. I&#8217;m Anna-Lisa Miller, the Executive Director at Ownership Works. Before Ownership Works, I was at Project Equity with Evan. It&#8217;s really lovely to be up here with him. I am an aspiring member of the Hall of Fame. Maybe five years. I&#8217;ll get there. We&#8217;ll see. I&#8217;m kidding. I started my career as an attorney in corporate and public finance before switching to the nonprofit sector, where I was broadly focused on economic opportunity and upward mobility.</p> <p class="">I started that work mainly focused on agricultural and rural businesses in Hawaii, where I was trained as a co-op developer. When I moved back to the East Coast, I was really interested in pulling the thread on cooperative economics, shared ownership and outcomes, and landed on employee ownership as this incredibly underutilized tool. It&#8217;s such a privilege to be in this space, and working on this effort. We have a pretty defined lane in the employee ownership community. We&#8217;re primarily working with companies that are very unlikely to form an ESOP, a co-op, or an EOT. We&#8217;re carving out a different path that&#8217;s a structure that has more flexibility, a little bit easier to implement.</p> <p class="">Our scale model is working with private equity firms who make commitments to share ownership in the companies that they acquire. They typically share it with the management team, so this is pushing it all the way down to the front line. As you can imagine, in these conversations, we&#8217;re all in this room because we believe deeply in employee ownership. A lot of us believe in the social impact and that it&#8217;s the right thing to do, but a common theme throughout the conversation has been we need to make our message resonate with a broad variety of audiences and understand the things that are going to be compelling to them.</p> <p class="">For a lot of investors and business owners, the business case is what is compelling. How is this going to improve the performance of the company? How does this move the needle for engagement and turnover? Ultimately, ownership culture is the conduit for that. We define ownership culture by a couple of key attributes. It looks like employees understanding the business and how they can contribute to it. It looks like employees feeling like their input and their ideas are valued, and they actually see that reflected in the business.</p> <p class="">It looks like employees believing that the company cares about their well-being, because it&#8217;s very&#8211; as Chris touched on, we all know that external motivation like comp, equity participation, it&#8217;s not really going to inspire behavior change. That has to come from intrinsic motivation and that sense that your company actually cares about you as an employee is a critical part of actually creating that psychological shift in how people feel, think, and act at the workplace.</p> <p class="">The fourth dimension of it is that ownership values and behaviors are embedded in the day-to-day operations of the business, and the business processes that are in play. Those are the four dimensions, and we can get into how we help companies operationalize that.</p> <p class="">[00:09:25] Adria Scharf: Thank you, Anna-Lisa. Evan, introduce yourself and your organization.</p> <p class="">[00:09:30] Evan Edwards: Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Evan Edwards. I&#8217;m the CEO at Project Equity. I&#8217;d be remiss if I didn&#8217;t shout out co-founders Alison Lingane and Hilary Abell, who are in the house, also Hall of Famers in the EO world. I&#8217;ve been in this role for five years, nine years in the EO space. It&#8217;s changed a lot in that time. Our work at Project Equity is essentially to drive wealth building for low and moderate income workers, communities of color, in an effort to bridge the wealth gap. It&#8217;s a real challenge, obviously. It&#8217;s widening. That is our impact work. The other really important part of our work is we seek to drive normalization and scale of employee ownership.</p> <p class="">I&#8217;ll talk a little bit about that in my comments around culture. As it relates to culture and how it actually shows up in the workplaces that we develop, I&#8217;ll just say this. You all are probably familiar with the saying that culture eats strategy for breakfast. We essentially understand that building a culture, that I can just basically plus one everything that Anna-Lisa said, is part and parcel to having an effective and productive workplace that workers actually feel valued and want to stay. Want to be a part of.</p> <p class="">[00:11:05] Adria Scharf: Thank you, Evan. Melissa.</p> <p class="">[00:11:07] Melissa Hoover: Hi, everybody. I&#8217;m Melissa Hoover. Sitting on this panel in my capacity as the managing director for Ownership Culture at Apis &amp; Heritage. Apis &amp; Heritage is a private credit fund that invests in companies in essential industries with low and moderate wage workforces to transition ownership to 100% S Corp ESOP right now in our Fund One model. That&#8217;s going to get a little more complex as we go forward. Essentially, I think the thing to take from that is employee ownership transitions with low and moderate wage workers, which is the lens I come to this through.</p> <p class="">Ownership culture is at the core of our work. Meaning, we put resources behind it. I&#8217;m on staff, and my whole job, as I tell people in the companies, is to make their jobs better. That&#8217;s what I get to do all day, every day. That shows up in our due diligence processes, in how we design and structure the plans for companies, in our post-transaction support, and in our own internal operations. That priority for ownership culture. To Chavon&#8217;s point earlier, I am obsessed with the real-world problems of human beings. I get to apply all of the incredible ingenuity and resources that we&#8217;ve put together at A&amp;H to try and address those problems at the workplace level.</p> <p class="">For us, ownership culture is always in the context of low-wage work in essential industries. Culture is what you say, what you believe, what you value, what you do, what your space looks like. I think it was Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines famously said, &#8220;Culture is what happens when you don&#8217;t think anyone is watching.&#8221; I think that people boil that down, oversimplify it. For me, it does show up in your habits, your reflexes, the unconscious ways in which you&#8217;re interacting with each other and with your work every day. If we take an ownership lens and apply it there, the&#8211; actually, I&#8217;ll save that. I&#8217;ll get into the specifics of how we assess, improve, and measure culture in the next few questions.</p> <p class="">[00:13:23] Adria Scharf: Okay. Thank you, Melissa. In my conversations with each of you, a theme came up about you can&#8217;t change culture by just telling workers they&#8217;re owners now. It needs to manifest in concrete ways. Maybe, Melissa, let&#8217;s just continue with you. What are some of the concrete things that businesses need to do, especially for workers closest to the work?</p> <p class="">[00:13:45] Melissa Hoover: Right. In the industries we&#8217;re in, and I think this is actually broader than our industries, but it&#8217;s particularly acute for people who have been underpaid, and poorly managed, and a lot of transition, is that they are not automatically enthused about employee ownership. They&#8217;re afraid and they&#8217;re skeptical. More broadly, American workers are not in a good place right now. The most recent Gallup poll shows 49% of workers say they&#8217;re struggling in their lives. I&#8217;m grateful to Brian Kulis, actually, for teeing this up by sharing some of his story, because people are working at work in a much broader context of their economic and emotional lives.</p> <p class="">49% of workers are struggling. 31% of them are engaged. Meaning nearly 70% of workers report not being engaged at work. 50-plus percent of workers are looking, or actively looking for a new job. Those numbers are going to be higher or worse across the board in low and moderate-wage industries. How do we enter that environment and make ownership meaningful for people who may just not even be making enough money to meet ends day to day? We think about people, systems, and processes, which is where culture lives in a company, but we think first about the conditions for ownership culture.</p> <p class="">Initially, I marched into our companies and was like, &#8220;We&#8217;re going to drive ownership culture.&#8221; Well, you can&#8217;t drive it if the conditions don&#8217;t exist, first of all. We look at the quality of jobs in the company. Do they meet basic needs? Do people have opportunities for growth and advancement? Are there opportunities for employees to share their voice? Which is distinct from control. Can they even be heard? Can they be agents in their workplace? That&#8217;s one of the conditions, is job quality. Another of the conditions is employee health and well-being.</p> <p class="">Are employees well enough to be at work, and at work in a healthy and whole way? Does the company have support systems that enable that health and well-being? Does the company share information? Do employees have the information that they need to think like owners? You can&#8217;t tell someone to think like an owner, or expect them to think like an owner if they don&#8217;t know how the company makes money at a very basic level. Information sharing is the cornerstone in a lot of ways. Then, are leaders invested, at some level, in the notion of job quality, health and well-being, and information sharing? Are the leaders of the company on board to be champions?</p> <p class="">Those are the base conditions. Then on top of that, we&#8217;re trying to drive an improvement in ownership culture. We look at incentives and structural changes that can be made in the company that will help people feel their ownership on a material basis day to day. We also work directly with middle managers. If leaders are the foundation, managers are where the culture happens. Most people leave their jobs because of a bad manager. That&#8217;s the abstract. I want to share a brief story, if I have time, about one of our companies, because I think it illustrates a lot of this.</p> <p class="">We work with a landscape company. Landscaping is a very difficult job. It&#8217;s hot. It&#8217;s heavy work. Turnover is really high. Pay is pretty low. People will leave a job for 25 cents an hour, and then they&#8217;ll come back if the new job gives 28 cents an hour. There&#8217;s a lot of turnover. This company had over 200% turnover when we started. Mostly at the front end of employment, but people churn constantly. We looked at that and said that&#8217;s one of the first things we want to address. We pointed ourselves at that issue and were successful. Their turnover has fallen every year that we&#8217;ve been invested. To now well below industry standard. Huge win.</p> <p class="">Okay. It&#8217;s a hard year macro economically. They see their work pipeline, there&#8217;s a patch where there may not be enough work to cover staffing. Industry standard is to lay folks off immediately, and then bring them back when the work comes back. That&#8217;s super expensive. It&#8217;s destabilizing, you lose quality, you lose workers. You might have to do it, but if you can see work on the other side of it, you don&#8217;t necessarily have to do it. You just have a rough patch that you&#8217;re going through.</p> <p class="">Incoming CEO, who we&#8217;re coaching and working with, who has really developed that ownership mindset, said, &#8220;I see the rough patch. Normally, we would lay people off here and then expect to bring them back in six months, but I don&#8217;t want to do that. We spent so long. The guys are finally sticking. They&#8217;re staying around. They get it. Their ESOP accounts are in the four figures. Can we do something other than lay them off?&#8221; He went out and got new work. He also initiated training for supervisors around how to talk about, &#8220;Okay, the guys know work is slowing down. They can sense it, and that makes them afraid, which makes them more likely to jump.&#8221;</p> <p class="">How can the supervisors talk to their teams about what it means to have a slow period, and when they&#8217;re expected to recover, and what the new work is going to be. &#8220;Why are we suddenly doing parking lots?&#8221; &#8220;Well, because that&#8217;s the work that&#8217;s available.&#8221; There&#8217;s a way that the systems that we put in place to increase retention, reduce turnover, are at the systems level, but the people are the ones implementing them, and they have a real material effect. They have not laid anyone off. They have grown their sales in new directions. Their employees now know how and why that&#8217;s happening.</p> <p class="">[00:19:51] Adria Scharf: Thank you. Evan, Project Equity facilitates so many transitions to employee ownership. From your vantage point, what is the role of culture? What is your perspective at Project Equity on the importance of culture in a real concrete way?</p> <p class="">[00:20:09] Evan Edwards: Yes. We start the process of establishing ownership culture fairly early in what we refer to as our client journey process. After a business owner engages in consultations with our team and they advance to a feasibility stage, we generally start to engage a small group of that workforce around what it means to be an employee-owned company. Just to take a step back, we frequently engage owners who want to take the concept of employee ownership to their teams. We say absolutely not. It will scare them to death.</p> <p class="">We do start this process fairly early, because it is work to start to establish culture. We have now 12 years doing this work, and I&#8217;d say nine actually doing the transitions. We have an important piece to our work that comes on the back end of the transaction. It&#8217;s a program called Thrive, where we actually stay with the business for two years, minimum two years, after a transaction. That is to assure that appropriate governance is in place, that the team is aware of and able to read financial statements, that they&#8217;re participating in decision-making.</p> <p class="">Again, all of this process starts early in the process with the understanding that we want that team on the other side of the transaction to be facile in how it is that they are going to lead this business going forward. The ownership culture piece, again, to go back to my initial comments, is what sustains a lot of these businesses. We saw, during the pandemic, clients of ours who workforces were making decisions around everyone going to, say, 60% schedules, as opposed to laying anyone off, or diversifying products and bringing new products online.</p> <p class="">These were all decisions that were driven by that workforce. It was because the culture was established early on that allowed them to understand that they were empowered to be able to make these decisions and to drive their own success.</p> <p class="">[00:22:38] Adria Scharf: Nice. Thank you. Anna-Lisa, you said your&#8211; Ownership Works has its own lane, but I&#8217;m curious whether some of what Melissa and Evan have said resonate, and thread through, and to what extent is your approach different at Ownership Works? How do you all approach working with management to cultivate ownership culture after an acquisition?</p> <p class="">[00:23:01] Anna-Lisa Miller: Yes, it absolutely resonates so very much. In our model, the ownership culture piece is a critical part of the puzzle. I come from a social impact background. I don&#8217;t often love doing something as a means to an end. Like the business case for diversity, but in this case, I love the business case for employee ownership because it means you&#8217;re creating a genuinely better workplace for employees. It&#8217;s an end in and of itself, and that&#8217;s evidenced by the incredible stories that you both shared. The way that we help companies operationalize an ownership culture is through four key pillars.</p> <p class="">Share knowledge, which absolutely resonates. Employees need to understand what the business goals are and understand how their work shows up in it. We emphasize sharing responsibility. There need to be avenues for employees to contribute their ideas and see those ideas reflected in how the company is operating. The third is to show care. As I mentioned, it&#8217;s important to address the needs and concerns of the employees to build that psychological buy-in and that trust. That can look like making sure you&#8217;re being, first of all, if you&#8217;re not surveying employees on employee engagement, that you start doing that.</p> <p class="">We also have an ownership culture survey that we encourage companies to add to their engagement survey that includes questions like, I trust the leadership of my company. I believe in the direction of the company. Then also, we encourage folks to launch complementary financial wellness programs because, as Melissa mentioned, so many folks are living paycheck to paycheck and on the financial edge. Even though our programs are free incremental grants of equity participation, there&#8217;s no risk. It&#8217;s uncertain. It&#8217;s dependent on the performance of the company, and it&#8217;s five years away. What do employees need today?</p> <p class="">It can go a long way to bring in financial coaching or launch emergency hardship funds to help employees weather those day-to-day shocks. The fourth part is really embedding it into the operations of the company. When we work with a management team, we orient them to this ownership culture framework. The first thing that we recommend is that we do leadership alignment workshop with the management team, to get the entire C-suite on the same page about why they&#8217;re launching the ownership program, and to articulate a few clear goals of the ownership program.</p> <p class="">It should be something more tangible to the employees than an EBITDA goal. It should include operational goals that frontline workers feel like they can impact. It should also include people and culture-related goals. So, targets around employee engagement or turnover reducing. That leadership alignment is really critical, because sometimes you&#8217;ll see a CEO who&#8217;s incredibly excited about sharing ownership, and maybe a CFO who isn&#8217;t convinced that this is the right investment in the workforce. When you can get everyone aligned and moving in the same direction, that really helps.</p> <p class="">We help them with the launch planning of how they&#8217;re going to announce the program, but more importantly, we help them with their 18-month post-launch roadmap of, what are the key initiatives you&#8217;re going to put into place to start building this ownership culture, that fall within those buckets of share knowledge, share responsibility, show care, and embed within the processes of the company. There&#8217;s a number of different ways to start operationalizing these things. Quarterly town hall meetings, making goals accessible, visible, keeping a scorecard, cascading the goals down to the frontline, so people can connect their day to day. Training managers is incredibly important.</p> <p class="">There&#8217;s just a ton of tactics. We have an inspiration gallery for companies where they can see what other companies have done. We also have large conferences where we bring companies together to learn from each other on how to build an ownership culture to bring that work to life. It&#8217;s been great to see that the support and this approach is working. Where we have data from the 186 companies that have launched shared ownership programs, over 75% have seen improvements in turnover, employee engagement, and the operational metric that we have the most data on is safety right now. We&#8217;re hoping to collect more data on customer satisfaction.</p> <p class="">We&#8217;re really focused on the ownership culture piece. It&#8217;s incredibly important for this work to spread in the lane that we&#8217;re in. It&#8217;s also just incredibly rewarding for our employees when you see those workplaces start to transform.</p> <p class="">[00:27:32] Adria Scharf: Thank you. Mr. Mackin. Dr. Mackin. [laughs]</p> <p class="">[00:27:37] Chris Mackin: Dr. Scharf.</p> <p class="">[00:27:39] Adria Scharf: You&#8217;ve been working deeply on these questions of ownership culture for a few decades, if not more. You&#8217;ve really pushed the field to deepen the understanding of culture beyond just communication, to think about rights, responsibilities, even blurring the line into governance. Just curious to hear your thoughts on, at what point does deepening ownership culture actually require a change in governance?</p> <p class="">[00:28:09] Chris Mackin: Sure. You&#8217;ve heard from our other panelists, and I certainly have no quarrel whatsoever with anything that&#8217;s been said about how most of the line of sight about whether you&#8217;re excited to go to work every day happens with what your job is, and life in your department. It&#8217;s the work itself. All of the good work that&#8217;s been described here, in terms of education and training and resources, is absolutely necessary. There is this promised land that&#8217;s been out there of corporate governance. Does 100% employee ownership in particular, should that have anything to do with the bigger questions about how corporations are governed? I think it should.</p> <p class="">To just weight into that for a couple of things, I think it should according to a couple of criteria. One that, I guess, at a values standpoint, we&#8217;re mostly talking about the values that would go into a board of directors. What should a board of directors be? I believe a board of directors needs to be three things. It needs to be expert, it needs to be largely independent, not necessarily completely independent, and it needs to somehow be subject to either a vetting or a voting process. The question of where the power is should have to respond to all of that.</p> <p class="">My thinking on this evolved over time. There is sometimes, I think, a romantic view that employee ownership should mean we have a majority of workers on the board and they elect their friends to be on the board. It was pointed out to me by a crusty lawyer in the ESOP movement many years ago when we were sitting and hearing that kind of presentation. He says, &#8220;Wait a minute, that&#8217;s a staff meeting.&#8221; It&#8217;s like if you just have your workers elect their friends to the board, supposedly the CEO is reporting to people who they have to report to as soon as the meeting is over. What kind of real robust discussion and deliberation is going on if that&#8217;s your board of directors?</p> <p class="">That&#8217;s why boards need to be expert. That&#8217;s why boards need to be largely independent, not completely independent. There need to be outside professionals whose careers and whose jobs don&#8217;t depend upon what the management thinks of them. They can leave if they don&#8217;t feel like they&#8217;re being listened to. Then this idea of vetting or voting, I&#8217;d like to propose, is because I&#8217;m trying to work this through myself. While you have in some advanced structures in some other parts of the world, like Mondragon, you have workers electing boards of directors on a one-person, one-vote basis. Okay, that maybe gets somewhere.</p> <p class="">In fact, I did some consulting for Mondragon and I pointed out that their board meetings are largely staff meetings, because they&#8217;re electing fellow workers and they&#8217;re not bringing in these outsiders. It occurs to me that a key committee for boards of directors that we need to zero in on is the nomination committee for boards of directors. We need to think of ways in which some elected task force or group of employees in these companies can evaluate candidates that are being put forward by the nomination committee for the board of directors.</p> <p class="">That worker committee would interview three lawyers, three engineers, three HR specialists, whoever it is, whatever expertise you need on your board. I trust workers won&#8217;t necessarily have all the technical expertise that those people have, but workers are better than anybody in judging the character, the respect, the ability of those professionals to interact with them and to learn. I would give them the final say in terms of vetting. Once people are professionally vetted to be expert and to be independent, then they should be selected in some form or fashion. Not just by the blue-collar workers. It should be everybody is involved in that.</p> <p class="">The struggle to work this out. Struggle is a little too melodramatic, but this hasn&#8217;t been really&#8211; it&#8217;s the promised land. People haven&#8217;t really talked about this. I think it is a bespoke custom suit. You&#8217;ve got to look at what the starting point is of every company. I&#8217;m suspicious of trying to put these ideas necessarily in legislation and mandating them, but I hear it in terms of our critiques from our friends in the unions and the liberal left or whatever, that, &#8220;Well, this is ownership without any real voice. The power remains untouched.&#8221; I think we could do something about that. I think we should have a developmental approach to thinking about that.</p> <p class="">[00:33:37] Adria Scharf: Thank you.</p> <p class="">[00:33:38] Melissa Hoover: That&#8217;s super interesting to me because the notion that you might engage workers in the vetting of the board as opposed to, or in addition to, direct representation on the board. In our model, there&#8217;s a seat for an employee on the board that must be filled by 18 months after we make our investment. There&#8217;s a nominating process, usually run by management, and then there&#8217;s an election of the employees. A lot of the early companies are like, &#8220;We&#8217;d like to nominate one person.&#8221; Then I&#8217;m like, &#8220;You realize you&#8217;re going to have an up-down vote on that person. That&#8217;ll be awkward.&#8221;</p> <p class="">They&#8217;ve gone ahead and done it, and it is awkward. Then maybe they get a little more confident, or some of the CEOs who are more open, I guess, will allow for a contested election. Then the employee sits on the board, and it takes them a year to two years to feel comfortable enough to even say a word. We do training and board capacity building and all that. We do an annual impact survey every year, an employee sentiment survey alongside an audit of the systems that are in place to support, because we always want to look at, are the things we&#8217;re doing materially reinforcing ownership culture?</p> <p class="">Across the board, even in the companies that have had contested elections, their numbers are going up, employees are more engaged, ownership mindset is going up, except around the employee on the board. There is a great deal of confusion, a lack of understanding. Even among the company, they literally had just had their election for their employee, and over half the employees said they don&#8217;t understand employee elections and employees on the board.</p> <p class="">I think in some ways, the single-person seat, it puts a lot of pressure on that seat to carry ownership culture work or representation or decision-making. I wonder if actually the governance model where employees have a vetting role builds ownership culture much more effectively than a single election every three years.</p> <p class="">[00:35:48] Chris Mackin: I think so.</p> <p class="">[00:35:48] Melissa Hoover: Yes.</p> <p class="">[00:35:49] Chris Mackin: Yes. If I could just add to that a little bit. Another distinction I want to put on the table, that often gets confused, and it gets back into not just the board but other dimensions of engagement, is the distinction between consultative power and decision-making power. You can do a ton of good work in terms of getting input from workers as long as you&#8217;re really clear upfront that this is a consultative process, but the decision is being made by X. Somebody who&#8217;s trained, their compensation and their career is measured by how well these decisions go.</p> <p class="">You want to invite people in to help you shape those management decisions with the knowledge, they need to have the knowledge that they&#8217;re not the ones who are going to make the final decision, but that their input could be brilliant and could be intelligent. Actually, the last thing to add on this is like, how do you know you&#8217;ve got a healthy culture? You know you&#8217;ve got a healthy culture when you lose a decision that you wanted to win, but you don&#8217;t feel so bad about it because you know there&#8217;s another day. So you build in a process. That&#8217;s how you build in a culture of democracy, because people believe that it&#8217;s not a zero-sum, all bullets on the table for one decision.</p> <p class="">You want that to be part of a gradual process, and for people to believe, okay, their idea, their candidate maybe didn&#8217;t make it this time, but I am going to be able to have another take at this because of structures. Not just spoken philosophies, but because of rules that have been put out there about how we govern ourselves. Last but not least, my final fantasy about what should be going on in these boards is lively, fun debates about the budget. Of like, &#8220;How do we spend our money?&#8221;</p> <p class="">I mean, who would think that a budget could be&#8211; but it could be a lot of fun if people, ahead of time, are given the resources and the training and stuff to evaluate the preliminary budget that management&#8217;s putting out, and come up with an alternative budget. Again, they may not win, but at least they are part of a process of engagement about something tangible that affects them.</p> <p class="">[00:38:24] Adria Scharf: Thank you, Chris. Anna-Lisa.</p> <p class="">[00:38:25] Anna-Lisa Miller: I&#8217;m going to channel you when we&#8217;re working on budgets. I&#8217;m going to channel you when we&#8217;re working on budgets and say, &#8220;This is fun. This is so much fun.&#8221; [laughs]</p> <p class="">[00:38:31] Chris Mackin: Yes. All right. Well, not so much for the consultants.</p> <p class="">[00:38:35] Anna-Lisa Miller: No. For companies where representation on the board by workers isn&#8217;t most likely, what we encourage is a scorecard. That the board is holding the management team accountable to that includes people and culture-related metrics. We&#8217;ve found that that&#8217;s just not often in the set of what&#8217;s getting measured.</p> <p class="">It&#8217;s a set of financial metrics, but if you put turnover and engagement and safety on par with those financial metrics, and you encourage management teams to do root cause analysis on why these things are low, in the same way you would push them when financial performance is lacking, to really get at the root of the problem. I think that&#8217;s another way to get the boards engaged in thinking about the quality of the workplace for workers without having a worker having a seat at the table.</p> <p class="">[00:39:28] Adria Scharf: This has been really rich. Thank you. Let&#8217;s pivot now to the next question, and zoom out and think more macro societally about culture at large. In the spirit of Paula D&#8217;Ambrosa this morning, I think said something like, employee ownership should be like American as apple pie, or just that set of questions. How do we really embed this idea? Thank you. Make it a normative part of the narrative. I think I&#8217;m going to switch up the order and, Evan, ask you about your thoughts, from your leadership post at Project Equity, how you all think about transformation of the larger culture as key to expanding the field.</p> <p class="">[00:40:09] Evan Edwards: Yes, thank you. We think about this a lot, because I think to achieve the cultural shift we seek, which is that employee ownership and shared ownership models are normalized, we need to make them accessible. We need to make them accessible, as Paula noted earlier, to Americans broadly, but also to certain constituencies within the small c culture. A couple of ways that we approach this work at Project Equity is we make a very concerted effort to educate business advisors. These are the folks who are first touch with small and middle market business owners. Their CPA, their attorney, their wealth advisor, sometimes a fractional CFO.</p> <p class="">To that end, we have developed learning programs. They&#8217;re accredited. Essentially, our objective is to have these folks bring employee ownership into their practice and on a regular basis, normalize, make referrals of EO transition to their business owner clients. We&#8217;ve been pretty successful. We launched this program about two and a half years ago. Over 5,500 advisors have used our learning modules at this point. One of the things that that&#8217;s done is that has allowed us to see that there&#8217;s appetite that extends beyond just the advisor class, so we&#8217;ve actually started to deliver modules in higher ed environments.</p> <p class="">Locally, Virginia Tech University is one of our partners. The Ross School, at the University of Michigan, is utilizing our learning programs. This is all about, again, that word I use, normalization, bringing employee ownership into environments where you&#8217;ve got young folks. I think we all studied things in college that maybe we didn&#8217;t pursue professionally, but we became amenable to. They became acceptable to us. That&#8217;s part of the work that we&#8217;re doing. We&#8217;ve learned insofar as engaging with higher ed leaders and even students. We&#8217;ve been partners with Morehouse College for a number of years, and I&#8217;ve been exposed to a number of their students. There&#8217;s appetite for EO learning.</p> <p class="">Late this summer, early fall, I think we&#8217;re rolling out a module that&#8217;s specifically for undergraduates that aren&#8217;t studying business. Again, it&#8217;s about that process of normalizing, bringing forward EO to those folks.</p> <p class="">[00:43:06] Adria Scharf: Great. Thank you. Anna-Lisa, you do a lot of communicating with investors and business folks. What are some of the messages that resonate most with your target audiences?</p> <p class="">[00:43:19] Anna-Lisa Miller: We launched in 2021 when everyone was looking for really credible ESG strategies. We emphasized that this was the right thing to do, that there was really strong social impact. We also emphasized that it was good for business. So many of us know the research and how that plays out. We&#8217;re in a different environment today, where ESG isn&#8217;t as favorable, but we&#8217;re very fortunate, I think, that we&#8217;ve built enough momentum and buy-in on the part of the firms that we&#8217;re working with, and they are really seeing this as a way to do well and do good.</p> <p class="">What we&#8217;ve found is that the social impact narrative is necessary and it&#8217;s not sufficient. Actually, the business case narrative is necessary and also not sufficient, because many businesses have been very profitable and very successful without having employee ownership. Even the business case, you have to temper it. When I really think about what will make this scale, I think of this in many ways as a leadership movement, because ultimately, you&#8217;re either going to have the mission-minded investors or CEOs who just instinctively are like, &#8220;Oh my gosh, this is amazing. I can include workers and juice the performance of my company? No brainer. I&#8217;m in.&#8221;</p> <p class="">That&#8217;s a small segment of CEOs and investors. The segment that we&#8217;re also really focused on are the ones who really deeply believe that people can transform the performance of a business. They&#8217;re the ones who are oriented around high-engagement cultures, high-performance cultures, and we want them to understand how ownership can be an accelerant and can be an important tool to take that organization to the next level. We&#8217;re trying to embed this in broader conversations around value creation strategies, operational improvement strategies, people and culture-related strategies to improve the performance of companies, because I think we need multiple entry points.</p> <p class="">For us, again, we deeply believe that this is the right thing to do, but also deeply believe that this probably, in the absence of policy, won&#8217;t scale unless shared ownership, employee ownership is truly seen as synonymous with value creation when boards make that connection. When you have a public company having a board meeting and they&#8217;re talking about performance, and they&#8217;re talking about their business plan and how to accelerate their progress, if someone&#8217;s actually introducing employee ownership as a strategy to help them achieve those goals.</p> <p class="">If a private equity investor is thinking about a value creation plan for a company that they&#8217;re acquiring, how can employee ownership help them achieve their goals? I think realistically creating that shift and embedding this as a leadership and business performance strategy is a really critical piece of the cultural shift that needs to happen for this work to spread. Otherwise, I think it&#8217;s going to remain in the domain of the very passionate, mission-minded leaders.</p> <p class="">[00:46:29] Adria Scharf: Melissa, what would you add on narrative shifts?</p> <p class="">[00:46:31] Melissa Hoover: Yes. I think we see this framing, a lot of like, &#8220;Oh, do we make the business case or do we make the fairness to employees case?&#8221; I guess I just want to jump right over that and say, yes, both and. I heard a little bit of talk this morning on the investor panel about moving beyond the values-based business case. I would say, yes, but move beyond only the values-based business case. Keep the values in there, partly because they actually do drive the business case. I saw one of our companies had a statement day recently.</p> <p class="">When the crew leads started spontaneously shouting out each other, and then employees, frontline workers, started shouting out each other and their crew leads, I was like, &#8220;They&#8217;re going to have a good year.&#8221; Their productivity is going up, I can tell, and the data bears that out. We know that, but I felt it in that moment. It&#8217;s this, we don&#8217;t succeed despite our values, but because of our values, that Felipe offered us this morning. I think this is actually employee ownership&#8217;s major contribution to our current moment. Where the macro economy is in a shambles. Per the Gallup survey, workers are struggling and stressed and stuck. Our politics have become completely fractured.</p> <p class="">There&#8217;s an opportunity for employee ownership to hold that center of values and business as if it were the most logical thing in the world despite the developments in the last several decades that have bifurcated them, and we see the results of that bifurcation. If we can help hold that together in a really muscular way, not like a mushy centrist type of thing, but like a powerful, these belong together and need to stay together in order to repair where we&#8217;re at right now in the economy and society, I think we can play that leadership role. In fact, we&#8217;re the only forum that has the material reality backing us up to make that claim.</p> <p class="">[applause]</p> <p class="">[00:48:41] Melissa Hoover: Oh.</p> <p class="">[laughter]</p> <p class="">[00:48:44] Adria Scharf: Well said.</p> <p class="">[00:48:45] Chris Mackin: Mic drop.</p> <p class="">[00:48:45] Adria Scharf: [chuckles] Mic drop.</p> <p class="">[00:48:46] Evan Edwards: That is a mic drop.</p> <p class="">[00:48:48] Adria Scharf: Chris, anything you&#8217;d like to add to Melissa&#8217;s deep insight? Also, I want to ask you specifically to speak to the idea of democracy. That we claim to be a democratic society, and yet the idea of workplace democracy feels strangely unnatural. Respond to Melissa, and then talk a little bit about, how does democracy connect to this ownership culture conversation?</p> <p class="">[00:49:14] Chris Mackin: Melissa and I go way back.</p> <p class="">[00:49:16] Melissa Hoover: [laughs] Thank you.</p> <p class="">[00:49:17] Chris Mackin: Oh, yes. I agree with Melissa. Let&#8217;s move on from there. You asked about the big political democratic&#8211; give this a little bit of thought. We all know we have a wealth deficit. We&#8217;ve talked about that. I think it&#8217;s fair to say that we have a democracy deficit in this culture, too. The swashbuckling, charming, charismatic pirate who was on the stage yesterday, Mr. Jason Kelly of Ginkgo, invoked my friend David Ellerman, who I started with many years ago, in reminding us that the employer-employee relationship is in some real sense a human-rental relationship.</p> <p class="">That there are very little in the way of rights that workers have, and when they&#8217;re imposed from the outside on a conventional employment relationship, they have to constantly be shored up and protected because they&#8217;re seen to be a threat. The idea of governing ourselves, and democracy, needs to be done at the firm level, firm by firm, as far as I&#8217;m concerned. The question of, can we do this? Can we govern ourselves? Well, was that the question in 1779 when all we knew were that we were subjects of a king? There was no such thing as people governing themselves politically.</p> <p class="">Were people ambivalent about that? Can we really do this? Don&#8217;t we need Daddy the King to tell us what to do? It&#8217;s time to open that can of worms, or whatever the metaphor is, and say, &#8220;Are we ready to be able to govern ourselves and our workplaces?&#8221; Can we do that in a way that recognizes that we have a division of labor, we have a division of expertise. We shouldn&#8217;t be governing or managing by referendum or votes. The idea of vetting people for the board and making sure there&#8217;s expert stuff. There needs to be checks and balances to make sure this stuff isn&#8217;t crazy, but the question is, do we want to do it or not? Do we want to have democratic firms, have a democratic economy?</p> <p class="">We did it, on the political side, in the 18th century. We can do it going forward. There are partial efforts that have been made imperfect by our labor movements and workplace democracy advocates over the years. They&#8217;ve stopped at the water&#8217;s edge of collective bargaining. They haven&#8217;t gone for the full megillah of owning and governing firms. Now, for this not to be just a PR, feel-good, ownership is a feeling thing, we have to have structures. We have to have commitments. We have to have laws. We have to have some regulations to make sure what we&#8217;re doing and this governing ourselves stuff isn&#8217;t just a passing thing.</p> <p class="">This is a long march to figuring out how to have constitutional democracies at the organizational level. For workplaces to develop constitutions that can be amended over time. These metaphors, these analogies between the political sphere and the economic sphere should be permissible. Should be fine. There&#8217;s nothing perfect, but there should be a judiciary-like function, there should be a legislative-like function, there should be an executive-like function in our firms. All power shouldn&#8217;t be in one place. It should be distributed.</p> <p class="">We need to do the work, and we actually need help from our political scientists, I&#8217;m seeing Mike Palmieri out there, and our philosophers, and people who study the history of these institutions, because democracy is not a brand-new idea, and it doesn&#8217;t have to be a crazy idea. It can be a very responsible idea.</p> <p class="">[00:53:29] Adria Scharf: Thank you. Merit, I understood we were starting five minutes late, so I can have&#8211; okay. Anna-Lisa?</p> <p class="">[00:53:39] Anna-Lisa Miller: I have to run to catch the train, so I can&#8217;t stay for Q&amp;A, but thank you so much. Take care.</p> <p class="">[00:53:44] Adria Scharf: Good luck. Okay.</p> <p class="">[applause]</p> <p class="">[00:53:48] Adria Scharf: Oh, jeez. Careful. Yes. Evan will make a quick remark, and then we&#8217;ll have time for maybe just a couple of short questions.</p> <p class="">[00:53:55] Evan Edwards: Yes, I just wanted to offer that it&#8217;s really important that we get to the capital C culture within these workplaces, but what helps us get there is showing up more in the small c culture. I talked a little bit about what it is that we&#8217;re doing to influence the normalization of EO. I think us being, as a field, effective communicators about employee ownership, the value propositions, and just waving the flag.</p> <p class="">I&#8217;ll offer that two years ago, we, Project Equity, produced a 30-second television commercial that is aired on both linear and digital platforms in a number of markets across the country. It&#8217;s been seen by over 1.25 million viewers. It&#8217;s driven a quarter of a million visitors to our website. It&#8217;s resulted in the numerous advisors who are now using our learning programs and the pipeline for our transaction services being as full as it&#8217;s ever been. I don&#8217;t want us to ignore the importance of that small c culture in terms of driving pipeline, driving interest, driving activation that gets us to be able to do the big C in the workplaces.</p> <p class="">[00:55:27] Adria Scharf: Thank you. Any questions? One or two questions? Yes.</p> <p class="">[00:55:37] Audience Member: Thank you all for such a wonderful panel. Evan, I can say that your ads are working and that they are reaching me.</p> <p class="">[00:55:45] Evan Edwards: Right on. Thank you.</p> <p class="">[00:55:45] Audience Member: I did have a fun day on YouTube where the ad was Project Equity. I was like, &#8220;Oh, cool.&#8221; To what you were alluding to, one of the things that I&#8217;m really curious about, especially this happening after the institutional capital panel, is in what ways are you all seeing success in scaling the transition training? Not getting people into the pipeline. If we&#8217;re really thinking about thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of businesses, what do you view as what&#8217;s needed to scale our ability to actually get the&#8211; and this is not just for you, Evan. Happy for anyone to respond, but how do we get to being supportive of that many people when it&#8217;s a really high-touch piece?</p> <p class="">[00:56:45] Melissa Hoover: I guess I would say the first thing is to blow out of the water the notion that ownership culture is training. It&#8217;s not training. Training&#8217;s great. You can do training. It&#8217;s important you have to do it, but that&#8217;s&#8211; as you&#8217;re right. It&#8217;s high-touch, and it&#8217;s hard to scale, and you can do learning management systems and digital training, but we&#8217;ve all been through training. Right? Did you really change after that? For me, the good news about scale is, yes, we live in a digital world, and you can do training digitally, but really, I think ownership culture lives in structure, to a great degree, and so that is actually scalable.</p> <p class="">You can design for purpose across multiple entities. Then it lives in processes in the business, and there&#8217;s a whole world of tools out there. Open book management, experts in open book management, the coaching approach to supervision. Those are the cornerstones of our ownership culture work. If you did just those two things and availed yourself of the resources and connected to those resources, which themselves are pretty friendly to employee ownership, or could be evangelists for to their companies that are already interested in coaching or open book management, then you&#8217;ve multiplied your impact without taxing your own staff. I think peeling ourselves off of training, which is&#8211; it&#8217;s my go-to as well, but to think about design and process and particularly partners with process.</p> <p class="">[00:58:10] Adria Scharf: Thank you. I think we&#8217;ll close it with that very concrete helpful note. Thank you so much to this very rich panel.</p> <p class="">[applause]</p> <p class="">[00:58:24] [END OF AUDIO]</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="wp-block-group alignfull is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained" style="padding-top:var(--wp--preset--spacing--medium);padding-bottom:var(--wp--preset--spacing--medium)"> <h2 class="wp-block-heading has-h4-variant" id="h-about-the-employee-ownership-ideas-forum">About the Employee Ownership Ideas Forum</h2> <p class="">The <a href="https://www.aspeninstitute.org/series/employee-ownership-ideas-forum/">Employee Ownership Ideas Forum</a> brings together leading policymakers, practitioners, experts, and the media for a robust discussion on how we can grow employee ownership for the shared benefit of American workers and businesses. It is hosted by the Aspen Institute <a href="https://www.aspeninstitute.org/programs/economic-opportunities-program/">Economic Opportunities Program</a> and <a href="https://smlr.rutgers.edu/faculty-research-engagement/institute-study-employee-ownership-and-profit-sharing">Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing</a>.</p> </div> <div class="wp-block-group alignfull has-primary-wash-background-color has-background is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained" style="padding-top:var(--wp--preset--spacing--medium);padding-bottom:var(--wp--preset--spacing--medium)"> <h2 class="wp-block-heading has-h4-variant" id="h-about-the-rutgers-institute-for-the-study-of-employee-ownership-and-profit-sharing">About the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing</h2> <p class="">The purpose of the <a href="https://smlr.rutgers.edu/faculty-research-engagement/institute-study-employee-ownership-and-profit-sharing">Institute for 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class="wp-block-group is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained"> <h2 class="wp-block-heading has-h4-variant" id="h-about-this-post">About This Post</h2> <div class="wp-block-group is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained"> <h3 class="wp-block-heading has-kicker-variant" id="h-people-authors">People/Authors</h3> <div class="post-taxonomies"> <div class="post-taxonomies__layout"> </div> </div> </div> <div class="wp-block-group is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained"> <h3 class="wp-block-heading has-kicker-variant" id="h-series">Series</h3> <div class="post-taxonomies"> <div class="post-taxonomies__layout"> <ul class="post-taxonomy"><li class="post-taxonomy__term"><a href="https://www.aspeninstitute.org/programs/economic-opportunities-program/series/employee-ownership-ideas-forum/">Employee Ownership Ideas Forum</a></li><li class="post-taxonomy__term"><a href="https://www.aspeninstitute.org/?taxonomy=series_1179_tax&#038;term=employee-ownership-ideas-forum-2026">Employee Ownership Ideas Forum 2026</a></li></ul> </div> </div> </div> <div class="wp-block-group is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained"> <h3 class="wp-block-heading has-kicker-variant" id="h-programs">Programs</h3> <div class="post-taxonomies"> <div class="post-taxonomies__layout"> <ul class="post-taxonomy"><li class="post-taxonomy__term"><a href="https://www.aspeninstitute.org/programs/economic-opportunities-program/">Economic Opportunities Program</a></li></ul> </div> </div> </div> <div class="wp-block-group is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained"> <h3 class="wp-block-heading has-kicker-variant" id="h-tags">Tags</h3> <div class="post-taxonomies"> <div class="post-taxonomies__layout"> <ul class="post-taxonomy"><li class="post-taxonomy__term"><a href="https://www.aspeninstitute.org/tag/employee-ownership/">Employee Ownership</a></li></ul> </div> </div> </div> <div class="wp-block-group is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained"> <h3 class="wp-block-heading has-kicker-variant" id="h-topics">Topics</h3> <div class="post-taxonomies"> <div class="post-taxonomies__layout"> <ul class="post-taxonomy"><li class="post-taxonomy__term"><a href="https://www.aspeninstitute.org/topic/economic-opportunity/">Economic Opportunity</a></li></ul> </div> </div> </div> <div class="wp-block-group is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained"> <h3 class="wp-block-heading has-kicker-variant" id="h-impact-areas">Impact Areas</h3> <div class="post-taxonomies"> <div class="post-taxonomies__layout"> <ul class="post-taxonomy"><li class="post-taxonomy__term"><a href="https://www.aspeninstitute.org/impact-area/economic-opportunity/">Economic Opportunity</a></li></ul> </div> </div> </div> <div class="wp-block-group is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained"> <h3 class="wp-block-heading has-kicker-variant" id="h-content-categories">Content Categories</h3> <div class="post-taxonomies"> <div class="post-taxonomies__layout"> <ul class="post-taxonomy"><li class="post-taxonomy__term"><a href="https://www.aspeninstitute.org/category/videos/">Videos</a></li></ul> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p>The post <a href="https://www.aspeninstitute.org/videos/shifting-culture-to-advance-employee-ownership/">Shifting Culture to Advance Employee Ownership</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.aspeninstitute.org">Aspen Institute</a>.</p>