Edinburgh Napier University

  It has been argued by that the employee ownership model offers a viable and competitive part of a sustainable economy. It has been suggested that organisations with employee ownership have: higher levels of employee satisfaction, employee commitment and customer satisfaction; better financial performance; higher productivity; improved work quality; high levels of productive employee engagement; lower rates of absenteeism; ability to create jobs more quickly; and greater resistance to market fluctuations and recession.


This report provides new, independent evidence on the impact of employee ownership on the health and wellbeing of employees. The research involved:

A questionnaire survey of 1037 staff in eight employee owned businesses. The organisations were selected to represent a range of businesses of different sizes, industrial sectors and geographical locations across the UK.
The survey results were compared to equivalent questions in national surveys on employee wellbeing including: the Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS) 2004; the Labour Force Survey; the Integrated Household Survey and the British Household Panel Survey. The principle comparator dataset was the WERS 2004
Case studies in four of the businesses that took part in the survey to provide detailed views.