Ever since the management buy-in dating back to 2001, there has been a gradual increase in the level of Shawston management share ownership. The Shawston philosophy is one of teamwork and building a world class team capable of providing outstanding customer service. Currently, there are over ten separate shareholders but control of the company still remains with the original buy-in shareholders.
Shawston Non Executive Director, Chris Borkett, is leading the project to widen the share ownership within the group, working closely with the Managing Director. Chris said “As the business is maturing, we think it is important to provide an opportunity for all employees to own shares in the company, and we are exploring the different ways in which this might be done. I am very hands on with this project and I have been encouraging Rob, the Managing Director, to place it at the forefront of our strategic agenda. We have recently joined the Employee Ownership Association (“EOA”) and have begun attending networking event such as the recent dinner at the Houses of Parliament attended by Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Treasury.
The financial and operational performance of employee owned businesses versus non employee owned business speak for itself with clear evidence that employee owned company share prices outperform non employee owned. Perhaps more interestingly there are a myriad of non financial benefits and one example to quote is during recessionary times, employee owned business tend to pull together, retain the staff without mass redundancies and emerge from recession much faster and in a more robust way – not dissimilar to what we have already seen at Shawston where post recession turnover has increased by over 30% with a lot more to come. Shawston have seen some of these benefits associated with employee ownership from the day one philosophy of involving management in equity participation, so our next and final step to what we would call fuller employee ownership will just cement our stature in the market place and further improve our already impressive track record of staff retention. We believe Shawston is a great company to work for and we want to make it even better.”
| See photos from the event on the left starting with Rob Davenport & Chris Borkett. Follow the link below for the news article of the Houses of Parliament event. |
Click on the link below to read more about benefits of fuller employee ownership.
https://employeeownership.co.uk/employee-ownership/the-evidence/