The March 2026 Employee Ownership Knowledge Share focused on the topic: Getting everyone ‘on the EO bus’. We were pleased to welcome Jayne Harrison, Employee Voice Manager at Shaw healthcare, the largest employee-owned healthcare provider in the UK and the Employee Owned Business of the Year at the 2024 EOA Awards.
eoa Award Winners
Shaw were noted by James de le Vingne, Chief Executive of the Employee Ownership Association, as “an exemplar in the sector of proudly employee-owned businesses working with us to lead the way in developing positive EO practices and delivering People Powered Growth in the UK”.
After receiving the accolade, how did that help boost the businesses drive to engage their workforce and what role did Jayne play?
Getting everyone on the bus – how can a business engage their workforce?
Shaw have over 3000 employees working across more than 65 sites which encompasses different regions and regulations! With such a spread trying to engage everyone presents a number of challenges, here are some of their challenges and solutions:
Communication
Communication works both ways and its important to be able to share information as well as enable and hear employee voice.
Across so many people and places you can’t rely solely on one format though – especially when not everyone has a work email.
Shaw communicate and listen across emails, newsletters, surveys, events, away days, printed materials, training, at shift handover, and with joiners and leavers.
Answering and acting on employee voice
Actually hearing from staff is essential. As is responding to and acting on that voice. Nothing reduces engagement like using your voice only for it not to be heard.
At Shaw employees helped the business to create their EO Mindset Behaviours. They created their own word cloud on anything they believed that made them feel like were an employee owner.
Then per care home they displayed them as a reminder to live and breathe them. And centrally they collected all and embedded them in frameworks and job descriptions.
In another example employees fed back that they felt overlooked in appreciation for the work they did. So, for the first time in their history, they held an Employee Appreciation Day across all sites. Each site chose their own theme, participated uniquely and involved the residents, improving feelings of inclusion and creating a memorable day for all.
Accessibility
Both communication and voice need to be delivered and encouraged considering different levels of accessibility. Not being accessible is the same as excluding employees from engaging.
Relevance
From Shaw’s perspective, you can do all the communications in the world but it has to be made relevant to employees for them to engage.
In two examples Shaw demonstrate how they have done this:
- When they won their award there were only a few people at the award ceremony, as you can’t take everyone. So instead of taking the award to the head office and putting it in a cabinet they took it on a road trip around all of their services and then turned the footage into a big collage video. Then, they used winning the award as a conversation starter: do you know what this award was won for?
- Made ‘ownership’ directly relevant to what the day-to-day jobs of their people are. Their staff work in people’s homes. How they work impacts both the experience of those they support and how much is spent on upkeep – if accidental damage when pushing large items through doors can be reduced across 65 sites it saves a considerable amount of money that could become their profit share.
Limitations
There is only ever so much you can do to engage employees. Some might not want to engage to the same level and that is fine, so long as they are still being good employees undertaking their roles as they are defined.
Facilitation
Jayne would not want to admit it herself, but she has been instrumental in facilitating employee ownership and employee voice at Shaw. A company this big needs dedicated resource but other smaller businesses should also consider how and who is going to take on the extra bandwidth required to make EO successful.
In Jayne’s case, with a background in HR and a passion for helping impact the lives the others (not to mention a good dose of tenacity), it’s a role made for her – quite literally.
Stephens Scown hosts the Employee Owners Knowledge Share monthly to help create a community space for employee owners, and those looking to transition. If you are interested in joining future sessions, please visit our Events page.
This article was co-written by Sam Moles (Ownership Engagement Advisor) and Dave Robbins (Associate in our Corporate team) who are both former employee ownership trustees, and currently sit on the firm’s Strategy Board.