How Employee Ownership Helps Our Committees Work Better, with Bret Boudreaux

In this podcast episode, Dr. Jonathan H. Westover talks with Bret Boudreaux about How Employee Ownership Helps Our Committees Work Better. Bret Boudreaux Director of Recruitment and Retention at BL Companies — a multi-disciplinary, employee-owned firm offering services related to architecture, engineering, environmental, and land surveying. In his role, Bret oversees the sourcing, recruiting and hiring of Engineers, Architects, Environmental Scientists and Surveyors for all of BL's 19 locations, and works closely with the firm's Employee Owners on their own professional development and company-wide professional development programming. Bret is Chair of BL's Technical Development Committee and Past-Chair of the ESOP Communications Committee. He is also VP of Programming for the New England Chapter of The ESOP Association. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:03Speaker 00

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• 0:35Speaker 00

  Brett Boudreau, welcome to the conversation today.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Thank you very much for having me, John. I really appreciate you having me on.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  It is a pleasure to be with you. You're joining us from Connecticut. I'm south of Salt Lake City in Utah. Today, we're going to be talking about how employee ownership helps our companies to work better. A really fun topic and an important topic, not as common here in the US as it is in some other parts of the world, though I think it's been growing in emphasis, growing in popularity a bit in recent years. And so I'm excited to explore with Brett how we can go about doing this as a strategic differentiator for our organizations. As we get started, I wanted to share Brett's bio with everybody. Brett Boudreau is Director of Recruitment and Retention at BL Companies. BL Companies

• 1:21Speaker 00

  is a multidisciplinary employee-owned firm offering services related to architecture, engineering, environmental, and land surveying. In his role, Bret oversees the sourcing, recruiting, and hiring of engineers and architects, environmental scientists, and surveyors for all 19 of their locations, and works closely with the firm's employee owners on their own professional development and company-wide professional development programming. I could go on, but I'm going to pause there. Brett, anything you would like to highlight by way of your background or personal context before we just dive on in?

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Well, I appreciate the great intro. I mean, really, for me, it's all about people and how can we get people engaged in the work we do and the company they work for. And so that's been a through line throughout my career that, you know, I've been doing it at BL for eight years now. So I'm excited to continue in that thread.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, awesome, awesome. Well, why don't you start by just explaining for us kind of your your way of of thinking about employee ownership? Um, ESOPs is is one area that I think many people are familiar with, but it can take different forms. Um, yeah, tell us a little bit more about kind of how you think about employee ownership.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So at its core, employee ownership is just a structure of a business. You have some businesses that are owned by one person. Uh, employee ownership is really a business owned by everybody who works there. We're all employee owners. You know, from day one, we we like to say we hire employee owners to be employee owners. Now, there is an actual employee stock ownership plan that is that tangible financial benefit and vehicle that ESOPs use. And the reality is we're a hundred percent employee owned, but you have to be at BL for a year before you start getting shares allocated to you. So we really have about eighty-five percent of our people have stock options, but we all act and think and behave like employee owners for for the benefit of everybody at BL.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  So it is just a structure of of a company in essence, as a as a similar owner or a publicly traded company, just all the shares are owned by people that work there.

• 3:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, and and I don't think it's that uncommon, you know, for for folks, especially in tech, um, some different industries where there's a lot of of equity uh, and shared ownership, uh, especially in the startup phase. Uh, so I think many people may be familiar with or have experienced that themselves. I'm not so sure uh that a lot of people have experienced a true kind of employee shared ownership kind of structure. Um, or, you know, this ESOP kind of an approach, um, where it's broadly owned across uh all the employees within the organization. Can you tell us a little bit more about uh BL and why this was the structure you decided to to take on?

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, we we were originally founded as as a local firm in Connecticut with two owners. As the original owners, we're looking to transition out of the consulting world in in two thousand and six. Uh, current leadership really wanted to uh think about the long term. How can we benefit all employee owners because it was a really tight knit firm? Um, so at that point, we decided to buy out the original owner's seventy percent stake. And give those shares to the employees of BL companies. And at that point, we're only 70% owned, but over the next five years, we transitioned to 100% employee owned. So all of the stock is owned by people at BL, right? A publicly traded company, anybody can own those shares. With an employee owned company, only people who are currently employed there are shareholders.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  So it creates an incentive structure for people to work hard for each other, for themselves, and create that long-term financial benefit in addition to creating that day-to-day great place to work. So, so it really is this model that allowed BL to think about the future and think about the long-term growth of all people there.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, and I really like that. And I think in this age of, well, let's just say the employee contract, um, the psychological contract has shifted quite a bit. And so, so commitment and loyalty back and forth between organization and employee and vice versa, you know, has, has shifted dramatically over the last several decades to the point now where I think the vast majority of people, if, if you were to pull people on the street, my, my guess is the vast majority of people would not feel a lot of loyalty or commitment to their organization or feel it back from their organization. You know, you can get laid off at any time. It doesn't really matter how, how strong of a contributor you are, how, how good of a performer you are.

• 5:38Speaker 00

  It, it, it feels like it's, it's a bit arbitrary and capricious and it can literally happen at any time. And so, you know, people are, companies are looking out for number one, people, you know, are looking out for their careers and their, their number one. This is a little bit of a different kind of an approach, right? It's, it's a bit of a shift back to maybe the mentality that, that many people had, maybe my father's generation had in, in previous decades. And, you know, as, as one who studies and researches in the area of organizations and, and, you know, the, the psychological contract being degraded as much as it has, has had a lot of negative impacts on, on organizations as a whole, on the employee experience within organizations.

• 6:24Speaker 00

  Maybe tell us a little bit about how, you know, your approach there at BL with employee ownership. You've already teased, you know, some, some of the, the benefits, but like, what does it really meant for the day to day experience of employees and for the overall kind of strategy and effectiveness of V L as an organization as a whole?

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think what, what I think you're kind of referring to and talking about is, you know, people don't want to feel like they're just a cog in some faceless machine.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  Sure, yeah.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  The old joke of, well, I come and I punch my clock and then I go home. That's not the reality of where we work nowadays, you know, work and life are all kind of integrated. So you want to make sure that people want to feel like they're having an impact in the work they're doing, the work they're doing is meaningful and contributing to something larger. And so for us as an employee owned company, I mean, there are challenges with running employee owned company because there has to be intentionality around it, there has to be transparency, there has to be communication. It doesn't just happen in a vacuum, right? It's not a set it and forget it model that it just goes because you want everybody engaged and engagement leads to success. So you can't have the metric be the outcome, right? That's not, that's not the success. But by having an engaged employee owner base who understand where the, where the company stands

• 7:36Speaker 01

  with the transparency, every Friday we have our, our CEO Carolyn has a call where she updates people on the state of the business. What are we doing? What do sign contracts look like? What are areas that we want to be improving and pushing? So people understand kind of the macro perspective of the company. And then it takes a lot of training internally with supervisors, with managers, with directors on communicating down, well, what's going on at every level of the company? And how is you as an individual contributor having an impact? Because you never want to feel like, well, it doesn't matter if I'm here or not. You want to know that your work is meaningful and it matters to the bigger picture. So it's about communicating to people how that fits in and the work that they're doing. So it is, it takes intentionality, it takes effort to make sure people continuously feel that because there's that mindset, this culture that we've spent a long time building and we

• 8:21Speaker 01

  want to make sure is maintained.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I like, you know, I was reading an article the other day about, um, structure versus culture, uh, and, and, you know, trying to drive strategic outcomes for organizations and for individuals. And, you know, there, there's different kinds of camps and different takes on things and. Personally, I'm not a believer in an either or. I think it's both. I think you you set up the structure of the organization, you design the work, the policies, practices, procedures of the organization, you know, really reinforce whatever culture you want to have. But there are, you know, cultural components often that are informal and tangible that also feed into it. And so it really is, like you said, about the intentionality of how we go

• 9:07Speaker 00

  about just putting together the holistic kind of experience of work for individuals. And and so this, you know, this kind of shared ownership approach is is one way to to go about structuring. But that in and of itself is not enough, right? If if you have this shared ownership, but you don't have the intentionality behind it, you don't have the open communication behind it, you don't, you don't reinforce the the shared ownership components into kind of the daily living within the organization, then it it doesn't have that much meaning for the average person, I would imagine. On the other hand, when

• 9:48Speaker 00

  it really gets baked in to everything that that people are doing across the organization, where they really truly feel, you know, from kind of every rung of the organizational hierarchy, they feel like they are a shared owner. They feel like they have shared accountability towards the outcomes. They feel like they have shared benefit and and that they win when everyone wins. When when that is truly felt and truly embedded throughout the organization and not kind of in name only and not just, you know, it, you know, and how the the stocks are are managed, but it's really ingrained, then it it can be become a huge differentiator

• 10:30Speaker 00

  for these organizations. Now, I've never been, I've never worked within a shared ownership structure directly. Now, I have worked in organizations where there there was some bonus structures set around organizational performance and around cost savings initiatives.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  And then the the organization would share some of that out across employees via via shared bonuses. So I I've experienced that a little bit, not the same thing exactly, but has some similar principles behind it. And I will say in in some of my experiences with that kind of a a setup. The organization as well and as well intentioned as they were, I don't think they fully leveraged the opportunity. You know, especially in in hindsight, as I look back on it, at the time, I'm thinking, oh, this is kind of cool. I've never experienced this before. That's nice that that they're that they're doing this. In in hindsight, I look back and I'm just like, eh, it it it really was fairly surface level in terms of implementation.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  And my guess is for the vast majority of people, it didn't fully make it into their day to day awareness of what they were doing. Uh, and so it didn't really have the performance impacts that they probably had intended for it to have. It probably didn't change the daily activities or the daily mindset of the average employee that much, I would guess. I I did study this at the time, but my guess is, you know, looking back on it, that that would be the case. And and I think coming back to now a more fully shared ownership kind of a a setup. Uh, I I would suspect it'd be the same, like the not every organization is is created equal. And not every shared ownership kind of structure is probably created equal.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  There are some organizations that are going to really implement it much better and have much better outcomes than others. And I I don't think it's just the structure itself, I guess, that that is going to ultimately become the win for the organization or for the employees. My guess is that there's been some growing pains. So you, I think you said back in two thousand and seven, uh, when this was initially set up. Super interesting idea, super good intentions at the time. My guess is it didn't all um start off perfect and that you were having to kind of figure things out as you went a little bit to really get the full level of intentionality and implementation uh and integration.

• 13:00Speaker 00

  Could you talk us through that a little bit and and maybe some of the the lessons learned along the way? And and some of the wins that were able to help you to gain momentum?

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I think, you know, one of the um big things for us is how do we set up the structures and then also give people the trainings and the tools to be successful? Because you can set up all the structures, but if people are not aware of how to add value, or how to think and act and behave like an employee owner, and how that leads to impact, well, then you're kind of crossing your fingers and hoping that people figure it out. Well, the right people have figured it out, but some people won't. And and it doesn't lead to to the um, you know, quick onboarding times, the success early on, and it doesn't lead to the type of growth that we want to see from all employee owners. So um, we set up the structure and became employee owned uh, two thousand and six was was when

• 13:52Speaker 01

  we transitioned. And, you know, in that time, we developed a lot of uh, trainings and tools for individuals, you know, as an employee owned company, if every single person is really good at what they do, then by and large, the company is going to be successful. So how can we set up the structure to allow for that success and then give people the opportunity and the support to grow into that? So uh, we are really big on leadership development. We want to make sure that we're giving people um, the the language and the skill set to do some of that introspection to then bring to to be as a whole. Uh, every year, we run what we call our foundations program, where we have between forty and fifty people that we fly into our headquarters in Connecticut, and we do a three-day training.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  It's run by our senior leadership. So there's buy-in from the top, right? It's run by me and our VPs and our president and our directors, where they're talking about real stories of how people have impacted BL as a whole. And it's also getting everybody on the same page. We're talking about how to give feedback effectively. Because if you can't give feedback effectively, how can you feel like your voice is being heard in a company? And probably more importantly, we talk about how to receive feedback effectively. Because you can give feedback, if people don't know how to take it, how to hear it, and how to um, utilize that feedback, well, then you're just screaming into the ether, right? So how can we do both sides and give not just every single employee owner, but particularly supervisors, the opportunity to build that skill set, to allow for those productive conversations?

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Allow us to have tough conversations, right? Feedback is just information. You choose what to do with it. And there's a way to present it in a way that's productive. So how can we start to give people the tools and the connections to be able to have some of those conversations? And then it is, it's the ongoing, you know, during COVID, we started these Friday calls with Carolyn as a way to keep people engaged, keep people connected, because we were primarily all in the office, or we were entirely all in the office pre-COVID. And we had to pivot. We had to tap into that agility really quickly. So how can we continue to utilize those same skills, even if it looks a little bit different? Because things change. Business changes, but employee ownership mentality doesn't. So how can we use that to continue to move forward, right? So it's continue that transparency, continue that communication,

• 16:00Speaker 01

  and then giving people the opportunity to see the impact of their work, right? And talking about how someone who is an entry level person right out of school, if they go and they're working really safely, well, that affects our EMR, which affects our ability to get work. So every single person can have an impact, right? You can lead wherever you are in the company. So it's telling people that, setting up structures to allow them to do that, and then giving them the tools to do it. That's really what it's about. So there are the system, the structural things as well as the ongoing development.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I really like that. And, you know, everything you were just saying, I will also say, you could do much of this without the the formal shared ownership structure of the organization. Like, so any organization, anyone listening today, who may be thinking, oh, this this sounds nice. There's no way we're going to do this. Like, there's no way we're going to change, you know, the the the structure and go to a full shared ownership approach. Okay, but so many of the things that you just said can essentially create a shared accountability, shared ownership, shared stewardship kind of culture within a team, within an organization, whether or not you have the ESOP, you know, arrangement,

• 17:13Speaker 00

  whether you know, whether or not you have all of the the the the actual kind of structural components there or not. You can still make sure that people feel connected to the broader scope, mission, and purpose of the organization. That they understand how their work connects to that larger vision, that larger purpose. Um, and and that they understand how what they're doing um. Beads into the success of the organization, to the team and to the organization. And how that's going to ultimately not only benefit the organization, but benefit them, how they're going to win when the organization wins. I think every organization, every team can can have that experience.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  Um, if if they decide to establish that kind of a culture. Um, and now it's a it's a different mindset. It's a different approach than a lot of organizations. Um, but it is one that I I would suggest, I I suspect, and I would suggest that most leaders. Um, at least to some extent, w- would say, yes, this is kind of what they want. They want shared ownership mentality. They want shared stewardship and accountability. Okay, so if you really want that, then you have to do the things. Do the, in in many cases, little things, but consistently do them in such a way that you can create that that real culture around what you're trying to accomplish. And it does come back to

• 18:35Speaker 00

  uh, having opportunities for reflection, having opportunities for development uh of your people. Um, and then and then build it into the conversations, build it into the the performance management and evaluations, build it into the ongoing other policies, practices and procedures of the organization. And then lo and behold, I I think you'll be, you know, maybe or maybe not surprised, but but you'll you'll be pleasantly, you know, uh surprised by by how much of an impact um this kind of approach can have for the average day to day person. And then for the teams and the organization as a whole. Um, I think when when I think of feeling empowered at work, when I think of, you know, feeling like I have purpose, like I have

• 19:19Speaker 00

  the opportunity to contribute in meaningful ways, that energizes me. That gets me to want to put my extra discretionary kind of effort uh into the work that I do to have better work, to have better products and services. Uh, to be more creative, to innovate more, uh, and it makes me less likely to start to get curious about that other. And start to maybe think about moving to a competitor. All of these things have tangible value for the organization from, you know, savings, from, you know, turnover costs to to just higher levels of productivity, greater creativity and innovation. So all of this, I think it be almost becomes a no brainer for for leaders as they try to think about how to be

• 20:02Speaker 00

  strategic in the new normal of, you know, this kind of constant disruption, constant change reality that we're in, in the current state of the workplace. Well, this has just been a great conversation, Brett. I really appreciate you taking the time to sit down with me. As we wrap things up for today, I wanted to give you a chance to share with the audience how they can connect with you, find out more about your work, your team, and then give us a final word for today.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I really enjoyed the conversation. I enjoyed being on and I love talking about employee ownership. The best way to connect with me is through LinkedIn, Breton, B R E T O N, Boudreaux, B O U D R E A U X, active on LinkedIn. I'm happy to talk about all things talent management, all things leadership development. If you're an engineer, architect, surveyor, environmental scientist, we're always looking to hire great employee owners as well. You know, I think as, as we kind of think about the future really is about engagement and creating people who are who want to contribute, who want to contribute beyond the scope of their title, who want to contribute beyond what that baseline expectation is. So how can we as professionals

• 21:12Speaker 01

  at any company set people up for success?

• 21:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love it. Thank you, Brett. It's just been a real pleasure. I encourage the audience to reach out, to get connected, find out more about what Brett can do for you. And as always, I hope everyone can stay healthy and safe. You can find meaning and purpose at work each and every day, and I hope you all have a great week.

• 21:33Speaker 00

  Thanks for joining us for this episode of the podcast. We hope you stay healthy and safe, and please join us again soon.