How Empowering Your Employees Helps Improve Business
B the Change Weekly: August 31, 2018
Delivered on Fridays, B the Change Weekly delivers the most important and most relevant stories about people using business as a force for good. The newsletter features a weekly note from the B the Change team alongside insight and context on the stories we share here on Medium. Below is our latest roundup. To receive these insights directly in your inbox, sign up for B the Change Weekly today. Now onto the good stuff:
Thinking long-term. Acting like a team player. Caring for the customers. Showing ownership mentality.
While any business would be lucky to have employees with those qualities, they’re a priority when Technicians for Sustainability (TFS) looks to hire. Inclusion and empowerment always have been part of the Tucson-based solar energy installation company’s mission, but they became official values when they company moved to employee ownership in 2017.
“We believe that employees who care deeply about what they do contribute to the profits, so they should have a share,” says Kevin Koch, who with his wife, Nicole, originally owned the company.
TFS and other Certified B Corporations that care about their employees’ well-being beyond the workday are setting the bar higher by joining B Lab’s Inclusive Economy Challenge, which allows them to set and work toward goals related to themes including family-friendly practices, equity in the workplace and shared ownership. In the process, they create businesses and communities that are better for everyone.
Where Having a Job Means Having a Say in the Business
Worker cooperatives — a form of co-op where workers have a stake in the ownership, profits and management of the enterprise — are seeing a resurgence amid those weary of a concentration of corporate power, stagnant wages and wealth inequality.
The people creating new worker co-ops are from far-flung backgrounds and work in varied industries. But they’re all driven by a similar desire to create more equitable workplaces that offer opportunities for employees to grow professionally and create wealth.
For James Razsa, a worker-owner at Democracy Brewing in Boston, the worker co-op model is a more solutions-based alternative to “fighting problems and bad bosses.”
“We’re hoping to be an example of something people would want to belong to and be a part of,” he says. “We’re also representing what folks could think of as their dream business.”
Read how Razsa and others are creating worker cooperatives that build better jobs and a more diverse economy on B the Change.
Leaving the Hierarchy Behind
As its workforce culture and core values evolved, Northwest Permanente (NWP) decided it was time to change its corporate structure. Founded as a physician-owned and physician-led professional corporation, NWP became a Certified B Corporation in 2016 — and since then its board of directors has worked to identify gaps and opportunities among its 1,700 employees.
They’re looking to fill one of those gaps by expanding shareholdership to all employee care providers. Currently, physicians are eligible for shareholdership within three to five years, and about 800 are shareholders.
The process of expanding ownership shares to more employees means the organization had to change its bylaws and articles of incorporation and create a new share class — tasks that also will serve NWP as a participant in the B Corp Inclusive Economy Challenge.
Read more about NWP’s move to build its diversity, equity and inclusion on B the Change.
Expanding Ownership, Spreading the Wealth
The employee-employer relationship has frayed in recent years as companies have outsourced and offshored jobs to cut costs. More than a third of U.S. workers are categorized as independent contract workers for hire in the “gig economy,” and unions, which once were workers’ strongest advocates, have seen their ranks and power erode.
Growing disparity of wealth and income has spawned renewed interest in worker-ownership models that are more inclusive and share wealth more broadly. These worker-ownership structures can range from simple stock-sharing programs to worker-owned and worker-governed cooperatives.
Learn more about the ways employees can own a stake in their business on B the Change.
Book of the Week
If you have a specific suggestion, let us know at info@bthechange.com with the subject line “book recommendation.”
The Kindness Quotient
By Rhonda Sciortino
Kindness quotient, or KQ, is a measure of how much each of us embodies the virtues of kindness, caring and generosity. A high KQ means taking advantage of all opportunities to be kind and finding personal success by bringing kindness into the world. Now there’s a way to boost your KQ and maximize your kindness potential.
“The Kindness Quotient” helps you understand how kindness affects, and is affected by, everything you do. Readers can learn to better appreciate the importance of kindness in their personal and professional lives and increase their levels of peace and happiness through kindness.
B the Change gathers and shares the voices from within the movement of people using business as a force for good and the community of Certified B Corporations. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the nonprofit B Lab.
