The April 2025 Employee Owners Knowledge Share focused on the topic: what is employee ownership success and how do you celebrate it? We were fortunate to be joined by guest speaker Arabella Lewis-Smith to discuss this topic, and below we share our five key takeaways from the discussion.
What is employee ownership success and how do you celebrate it?
To continue to function, deliver on it’s purpose and to provide work and security for it’s people, a business needs to be successful. Each business will have a different criteria for success, and those goal posts might move further back over time.
Does being employee owned change what success looks like? Now employee owned, a business might have a great many more owners so are there now many more measures of success for a business to deliver on?
And when success is achieved, how is that celebrated to both pay credit to the milestone and set the people in a business up to push for the next goal?
Arabella Lewis-Smith, Founder and Managing Director at Salad, joined our April event to share her wisdom and experience as a business owner selling their shares to an EOT four years ago. Bella is a passionate advocate for employee ownership and has seen Salad experience many highs as well as some lows with the transition to employee ownership.
Our five key takeaways from the April knowledge share are:
1. Employee Ownership success means business success
A lot changes and little changes at the same time when a business becomes employee owned. The business still needs to operate and succeed in the same ways, financially, before and after, in order for the business to continue functioning.
Post-transition, and again post-financial freedom, the business might also now need to start succeeding in additional ways as the model of ownership changes and the employee owners look at further measures of success.
Success now might also include a focus on culture and the workplace, or in the level of purposefulness and the ability to give back to a group or the community.
2. Employee Ownership success should be communicated and understood
However success is defined and measured, and eventually celebrated, your people need to understand and have had it communicated (again and again).
To have ‘employees’ feel like ‘owners’ and take responsibility for delivering success they need to have the information to know their progress towards that particular measure of success and why it is important in the context of the overall business – i.e., new work coming in and the predicted revenue meets expectation and will deliver profit share in the region of x.
Knowing what the measure of success is and having it communicated frequently enough means that when celebration comes around it should be felt more strongly by employees.
3. Employee Ownership celebrations can take many forms
Celebrating success in any business can take many forms, from small to grand gestures.
If you are a small business then maybe you go on a short holiday as a whole team, if you are a large business then perhaps all staff together in one space for one day is more appropriate. Perhaps tied into the annual EO Day celebrations to reaffirm your position within the EO community.
Celebrating in smaller and more frequent ways should not be overlooked though as a more effective way to celebrate and visualise what success looks like. It is incredible how low cost but engaging anything to do with free food is for allowing people to take their focus away from their work, to distil a message of success, and to engage communally with their colleagues in celebration.
4. Employee Ownership celebrations should have a known purpose
Before deciding how to celebrate, you should ask the question: why are you celebrating? Knowing that answer can often help finesse the form that your celebrations take.
It might seem a straightforward answer: celebrating is to acknowledge and thank for the delivery of success. But celebrating also rewards behaviour and leads to the likely repetition of that behaviour. So, celebration can be used as an attempt to recreate more favourable behaviours while toning down less favourable ones.
In defining to employees how an action leads to more of your chosen measure of success you are empowering employees as owners to alter their behaviour to meet the best outcomes for their business.
5. Employee Ownership celebrations might not be attended by everyone
Not everyone will engage in your celebrations. Personality, age, industry, additional commitments and many other factors can contribute to not everyone wanting to go to the pub at 17:15 on a Friday after a busy week of work.
Challenge yourself:
- How are you celebrating? Is a leadership team defining what that looks like?
- Could you open that choice up to your employees to decide? An employee council perhaps if you have one.
- Do your celebrations always look like events (instead could you not think outside the box and provide more bespoke and meaningful displays of celebration)?
- Do your celebrations place great behaviours on a pedestal for others to strive for?
Stephens Scown hosts the Employee Owners Knowledge Share monthly to help create a community space for employee owners, and those looking to transition. If you are interested in joining future sessions, please visit our Events page.
This article was written by Sam Moles (Digital Marketing Manager) our former employee ownership trustee, and currently sitting on the firm’s Strategy Board.