ESOPs are a wonderful organizational structure, they can:

• Reduce wealth inequality through broad based equity sharing
• Provide wealth generation for retirement requiring no financial contribution from the employee
• For employees not planning to retire, the ESOP can still build wealth
• Provide an opportunity for employees to be more engaged and involved through participative management philosophy
• Create a working environment of approachability, openness, and collectiveness (all for one mentality)

ESOPs have the capability to do a lot of positive things, but ESOPs can be a complex beast, with lots of rules, regulations, and internal policies and procedures.  Often the responsibility for communicating about the ESOP falls to the ESOP Communications Committee (ECC) where sometimes the administrative element becomes the focus of the message and thus becomes the elephant in the room.  The ECC needs to identify what message it wants (or needs) to communicate to their fellow employees (do we need to communicate ESOP mechanics, Plan information, Company Culture, how we connect the dots between employee actions and company performance), what is the best way to get that message out, and finally how often does it need to be repeated.  From research and personal experience – the One and Done concept just does not sink in when it comes to communicating complex subjects.

ESOP Partners provided a very good blog post concerning what you say, and how you say it.  They have a number of great ideas that the ECC may be able to incorporate to help spread the message about your ESOP.

The ECC has a hard job.  They have the responsibility to communicate about the ESOP to their fellow employees, while they may be learning this information for themselves at the same time in the case of a new ESOP, or for new ECC members added to the committee.  This can be overwhelming like eating the elephant!  A key element in helping the ECC be successful is being able to celebrate each success along the way – similar to Jeff Muir’s video:

Don’t let your ESOP be your companies best kept secret!