I would like to get your opinion about employee owned companies.
I do prefer working for companies that are employee owned. This means that employees can invest in the company and that no shares are owned by external investors. The financial incentive is often the stable dividend rather than making profits due to risen share price.
For me, working at these type of companies is still way better than working for a publicly traded company where profit often feels like the only purpose (to please the share holders). However, I got a bit reluctant to invest in the employee owned company as a employee because I find the system a bit unfair:
- I find it a capitalistic implementation where the more you are willing (or able) to invest, the larger your cut of the profit. Everybody worked just as hard for that profit so why should you be able to get more if you got more shares.
- To get a management position, you often have to buy a significant amount of shares "as incentive to do your work as a manager I was always told". Of course, they have more responsibility but they already get a higher salary for that. Why also get a bigger part of the profit?
- On the management part, if there is also a voting system linked to the amount of shares you have, it also means that the management has a significant (majority?) saying in things. Legally the company is owned by the employees but not when it comes to decision making ( if employees are consulted via their shares).
What are your opinions on this and would you participate? Of course, not participating will not have consequences for the system because others will just buy those shares, but by participating you show support for an, in my eyes, unfair system.
Curious more about what you learned from your SCOP experience; I'm actually in the process of setting one up with a colleague and would love to hear any tips you have! In terms of culture, things to avoid or lean in to, etc. Merci en avance :)
Pas de soucis ! It was quite a specific experience, so it might be useful to put in some context in here : it was a studio making apps and games, founded a decade ago, always has been a SCOP, they started being 3-4, and when i was here we were between 15 and 20. Also, i was first an intern, and then got a short-term contract : in both cases, i was not offered to participate as a share owner, you have to have a long-term contract for this. I also have a relatively short experience there (10 months).
One of the pros was there was a lot of discussion about most subjects. The fact it was a relatively small studio helped too, both for the number of people and the methods : open-space, weekly meeting with everyone, shared relaxing time (lunch, afterwork, teambuilding days, etc.). Even as an intern, i got to hear about most subjects, even general ones like financial state of the company or which projects to accept or reject.
Another one was the company values (not necessarily inherited from the SCOP thing, but when you do a SCOP it's more likely) : they wanted to do projects with a good social impact, and it was nice working on those. It is relatively limited though : since you have people and taxes to pay, you have to get profitable projects, and most of the time, they're not the one with the biggest social impact. Doing projects for banks or army led to some debate, and the temporary result was that it was best to work for them and still exist than just close the studio.
A con i heard from the share owners is how to handle shares when someone leaves the studio. Two options are either everyone buys them (but not everyone may have the money immediatly) or the person keeps them (but then you have someone who owns share and does not work here, so it may counteract the purpose of the SCOP). This question is even harder when the person is a founder and/or when the person has to leave involuntary (sickness or wrongdoing). I guess it's best to have it planned beforehand, but it would not prevent all the friction anyway.
Another con was the perception from the non-share owners : there were constantly 2-3 interns, and 1 apprentice. If you consider very low salary, least interesting tasks and no saying in the decision making, it was not that different from a classic studio. And from the owners point of view, it was kinda legitimate : there was not enough money to pay someone 100% for those tasks, they had to be done, and it would be quite weird/complicated to include people staying only 6 months in the decisions making, even worse for the shareholding. Anyway, there was some tension around this, but it's also due to the number of workers and the field of the company.
In general, it still is something nice. I'd say the main advantage was communication to my eyes : the more you can communicate about anything in the company, the better it is. It does not prevent some problems like overwork (it can even be worse since most employees feel some kind of responsibility) or toxic management (in the end, it really depends on your direct superior, when there is some hierarchy) : you have to come up with specific methods to counteract those (for overwork, they tried to track time and to make sure everyone was leaving at the end of the day, and for management, they were in the process of splitting it so everyone would have 2 managers to refer to, in case one was bad). But all of this is probably a (maybe not so) distant future if you're setting one up for two people, so it's probably not very relevant. Probably worth to discuss it now around a drink though, but not crucial.
Merci beaucoup, this is quite helpful! If we are successful then these will be good problems to tackle down the road. The CDI/CDD thing is something that seems to be quite a bit divide in France (have only lived here 3 years so still getting used to it).