Employee Ownership - how is it going?

Our Managing Director, Nick Billingham , reflects on Charity People’s employee ownership journey.

As I sit at my desk in July 2024, it’s been a full nine months since my colleagues and I made the huge decision to go employee-owned.?

Charity People has been around for more than 30 years. We were founded in 1990 with the support of The Prince's Trust to promote the charity sector as a great sector to work in. Our Founder, David Lale, had a goal: to attract the brightest and most dedicated candidates, and to streamline recruitment for charities.

Over the past three decades we’ve grown and shrunk, and grown again for all the reasons business evolve and expand - the needs of clients and candidates and other offers on the market. David captured the journey brilliantly in a ‘Pizza for Losers’ session with Fundraising Everywhere.?

Handing on the baton

Our purpose - to help the non-profit sector recruit more efficiently, more effectively and in recent years, more inclusively - has always been the driving force behind what we do. So when David stepped back from leadership a few years ago, his exit from ownership and the move towards employee ownership felt like the natural next step.?

What is employee ownership?

There are different types of employee ownership, but according to the Employee Ownership Association , it can be defined broadly as a system of ownership where, “employees have a say and a stake in the company they work for.”

In practice at Charity People, employee ownership means that the shares of the company are owned by a trust and the trust exists to support its beneficiaries - all current and future employees of Charity People.???

We also have a flatter more collaborative structure where groups or committees of employees take responsibility for different aspects of our strategy. We’re in the process of formalising our staff engagement forums to ensure that all staff have a say in the running of the business.

In addition to our Senior Management Team (SMT), we also have a Trustee Board with a similar role to Charity Trustees - ensuring that SMT decisions are in line with the Agency’s strategy and in the best interests of all employees.?

The journey so far

While we are confident that the switch to employee ownership was the right choice, it wasn’t the easiest path. There have been challenges during the transition, but we knew that maintaining the core values and culture of the company was more important than bringing in the wrong people. And taking a strictly “growth-based” approach to the transition might water down everything Charity People stands for and everything that has earned us the trust of our clients over the past 30+ years.

The ups and downs of the transition have been captured by our quarterly staff satisfaction survey (pulse survey). Initially staff satisfaction dropped as we were living through the disruption of a big organisational change, but in the last two surveys we have seen significant jumps in staff happiness and pride - 94% of our staff take pride in working here, according to our last survey.?

We are still learning how to communicate this change to our clients. “So what?” Is the typical response! Our answer: we’re confident that employee ownership will enhance the quality of our service and that all of our staff will demonstrate the owner mentality of delivering excellence.?

The future

As a leadership team we’re feeling incredibly optimistic about the future.?

We’re very interested to see whether more businesses will become employee owned as purpose becomes as much of a driving force as profit in significant areas of the commercial sector.?

As for David? He’s being kept busy at Oxford HR , still dedicated to attracting the brightest and most dedicated candidates for Non-Profits globally.?