My interest into Employee Stock Ownership Programs (ESOP) was sparked through reading my classmate Jude’s blog post about Disney’s ESOP for extrinsically motivating their employees. Upon further digging into business news, I was brought to the attention that Chinese company Alibaba is also notorious for paying its employees through stocks. In Jen Wieczner’s article on Fortune, she writes that through motivating employees with ESOPs, Alibaba is able to receive and ship more packages than US e-commerce giants Amazon and UPS, even with fewer employees on payroll.
While investors in Wieczner’s article doubted Alibaba’s ability to overtake Amazon and USP, I believe that more companies in North America should take note and introduce ESOPs into their employee motivation programs. ESOPs are typically used to reward employees if the company’s stock price goes up. While many companies still rely on motivational tactics such as bonuses and pay raises to encourage employees to push the extra mile, my personal experience in the workforce pushes me to say that most employees, especially the ones where their roles in the company are not very significant, will not push the extra mile for the company to succeed as an owner would. So instead of constantly trying to motivate employees to act like owners, companies should follow Alibaba’s success and essentially make their employees owners through ESOPs.
Word Count: 220
Sources:
http://fortune.com/2016/02/05/alibaba-stock-pay-disturbing/
https://blogs.ubc.ca/judearafeh/2017/03/27/disneys-happily-ever-after/