Employee share plans have long been a powerful source of team alignment, loyalty and performance. But too often, they are misunderstood or dismissed as too complex to truly connect with staff.
Across both local and global workplaces, trust, transparency and digital convenience matter more than ever. The organisations achieving the greatest employee engagement with their share plans are embracing smarter communication strategies and leveraging new technology to bring their plans to life.
In this article, Computershare and two clients – one global and one local company – share insights on how to increase employee engagement with share plans.
Leon Butler
Global Director, Performance and Reward, Treasury Wine Estates
Nicole Zanette
General Manager of Reward & Governance, Coles
Navigating the challenges of representing diverse workforces
Communicating with all staff across a large organisation is challenging in any industry. From senior executives to the broader workforce, great variation exists between personal situations and financial literacy.
Nicole Zanette, General Manager of Reward & Governance at Coles, explains that the company communicates with 115,000 team members around Australia, about 75,000 of whom are eligible for employee share plans.
“We've got people who are on the shop floor in our stores, and sometimes English is also a second language, and we've got a lot of young team members where this is their first job,” she says.
For Treasury Wine Estates, a global company with 2,600 team members across 25 countries, there's the added complexity of operating across multiple tax regimes, explains Leon Butler, Global Director, Performance & Reward.
“We have people who are starting either their first job at a packaging centre or working in the office in Melbourne, through to some of our winemakers who've been with the business for 40 or 50 years,” he says. “So we've got age diversity as well as ethnic diversity that adds language challenges.”
Both Zanette and Butler have found success using simple visual tools, such as animated videos and infographics, to explain their employee share plan benefits – but that's just the starting point. Timely communication strategies and innovative mobile apps for employee engagement are crucial throughout the plan's life.
Leveraging leaders, executives and local champions
Issuers have an opportunity to distil key messages for leaders to share with their teams to help make employee share plans easy to understand, remember and share.
Coles does this with its store managers across its 800+ stores around Australia, explains Zanette. She adds that using trusted leaders to demystify employee share plans always works best when the managers have positive personal experiences.
“If you've got a great leader who's a great advocate for what you're doing, the team really trusts those leaders, and they look to them,” she says.
But knowing how to increase employee engagement starts at the executive level. Zanette says Coles CEO Leah Weckert is a master of clearly communicating complex financial information to the entire workforce using clear and concise messages and plain language that meets people where they're at.
Treasury Wine Estates takes a similar approach, and being global, particularly leans on local HR teams, explains Butler. “The local team activate events, whether it's webinar sessions or onsite education, and we've seen those sorts of activities certainly impact the participation of the plan.”
Timing and regularity of communication are crucial
It can be too easy to fall into the trap of thinking an employee share plan is just a one-time transaction at launch. But timing is critical.
Many companies are seeing success with communication ecosystems linked to key career milestones, such as when people move into management. Briefing executives to share general reminders at all-staff meetings can also keep share plans top of mind among staff members at all levels.
Zanette and Butler both point out the importance of avoiding the common assumption that seniority equals understanding of, or interest in, employee share plans. “We look at education across the whole life of the plan, and that needs to follow the individual's career,” Butler says. He points to the different messages needed at three key stages:
- Launch: concentrate on the basic mechanics of the plan
- Mid-plan: focus on how performance impacts the outcome
- End of plan: explain tax implications.
Zanette adds that once they achieve participation, Coles enjoys strong retention among its staff with employee share plans. “Particularly in a broad-based plan, once they've participated in one year, they tend to just continue to participate because they see the benefits of it, they see the dividends coming through, and they see, hopefully, their appreciation in the share price and so their experience has been great,” she says.
Technology as a key tool to drive employee engagement
Tapping into employment lifecycle events is easy with Computershare's EquatePlus mobile app, a key component to enhancing employee engagement through technology, explains Butler.
“We've become used to being able to access information on demand through apps – whether that's tracking our fitness, banking or social lives – we now expect the same from our equity plan,” he says.
Zanette agrees that technology is key to employee engagement. “Having EquatePlus with all the document libraries – we've come a long way in terms of the technology being able to help people,” she says.
Interestingly, 75% of customers judge a company's credibility based on its online experience, 88% of users are less likely to return to a website after a bad experience, and 94% of users mistrust online platforms due to poor design. This is why Computershare places innovation at the core of its identity and mission, explains Trudi Giouris, Product Director, Employee Share Plans, APAC at Computershare.
“We are driven by a singular purpose, which is to empower our clients and their participants with the most effective and engaging share plan solutions available,” Giouris says. “All of our client and participant feedback shows that EquatePlus is really delivering a superior experience.”
