The following is an excerpt from an article originally published in Business Insider, featuring Ownership Works’ Executive Director Anna-Lisa Miller:
“Employers often say they prefer to hire employees who act like owners. As the executive director of the nonprofit Ownership Works, Miller aims to get employers to act on that ethos.
‘It’s not credible to ask employees to feel, think, and act like owners if you don’t give them a financial ownership stake,’ Miller said.
Since its founding in 2021, Ownership Works and its corporate partners have shared $570 million in wealth across six companies and worked with more than 160,000 workers at 113 companies.
One way Miller seeks to convince business owners of the merits of employee shareholding is by showing them how it can improve the bottom line. She pointed to a time an employee in an Ownership Works company helped their employer save money by replacing a component costing $100 with a 3D printed part that cost just a few dollars.
‘They often know where the company is losing money or making a mistake or where things could be better,’ Miller said. ‘And they often have ideas for how to fix the problem. It’s just nobody ever asked them to.’
Miller’s career in employee ownership grew out of an interest in community development. Early in her career she helped a nonprofit in Hawaii create farming cooperatives, and she worked with another nonprofit to convert small businesses into worker cooperatives.
Miller said she wanted to find scale, so she approached Pete Stavros, KKR’s cohead of private equity. Stavros first experimented with employee ownership at a garage-door manufacturer in 2015, leading to some of KKR’s best results. He was looking to spread that model further.
After announcing the creation of Ownership Works with a $10 million donation, Stavros hired Miller as his first employee. Now it’s her job to help the company’s 35 private-equity partners, including KKR and Apollo, institute plans in their portfolios.
She does this in part by partnering with accountants, lawyers, and professional-services firms to make it easier to create these plans, acting as an employee-ownership consultancy. The organization also collects and shares metrics of success, such as hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to employees and decreasing turnover and higher profits at companies with employee ownership.”
Read the full article on Business Insider.
