Employee ownership is about recruiting, rewarding and retaining the best employees and engaging them so that they are motivated to work towards your company’s overall goals. Happy employees perform better, and a big motivator is obviously financial reward. But if your employees have no visibility of their awards, are your comp plans really doing what they’re supposed to do when it comes to driving engagement? Unless employees have visibility of what they own and of how much it’s worth, are you maximizing the true power of what stock ownership can do for your company?
Showing employees the value of what they have is key to driving engagement and really unlocking the power of your employee stock plans. Investing in a stock plan but not giving employees access to their stocks can be an expensive experiment.
Here at Global Shares, Employee Ownership, Simplified, is our motto. And we take that motto and apply it across every aspect of our business. For our global regulatory and tax compliance services, for example, we hire the best experts in the field, who keep it simple for our clients. They only need to know one thing, that they are fully compliant while operating at the best efficiency – we take care of the rest.
It’s not just compliance, though. Our emphasis on simplicity informs all of our decisions from our onboarding team to the stock plan analysts who work daily to ensure that a company’s employee plans are managed properly.
This approach has had its biggest impact on our employee platform. It’s the reason we decided to build our own from scratch. After years of using third party software and seeing the gaping holes in functionality, we knew that we could build something much bigger and better that would service our clients fully, no matter where in the world they or their employees were based.
We used our considerable experience and expertise in the equity compensation field to ensure that the portal was incredibly easy to use, while still being the industry-leading, most cutting-edge platform available on the market.
And we’re always building on it too. We’ve got an in-house product team of software developers – many of whom are also certified equity professionals – who are constantly optimizing and improving and we’ve got some exciting changes coming up that will make our platform even easier to use.
So, what makes our employee portal so simple? Let’s take a look.
One-stop shop
If you’re going to simplify your employee stock plans, you need to have everything in the same place – which means that the share plan needs to be fully digital.
Everything the participant needs or wants is located in our portal. It’s a one-stop-shop – they can enrol or accept awards, vote in the AGM or transact, view documents and contract notes, as well as see and understand their entire equity portfolio.
But just because it’s a one-stop-shop, doesn’t mean it’s cluttered or confusing. We strike a balance – comprehensive, but clear. Novice users can easily understand their portfolio and how to manage it, while more experienced users are able to examine it further.
Global access
These days, companies are getting larger and expanding across the globe. But employee ownership only works if it works for all employees. Same plan, same rules, same portal.
That’s why our employee portal is multi-lingual – users can easily switch back and forth between their preferred languages with the click of a button. It’s the same for currencies. This way, no matter where your participants are, they see the same portal.
Not to mention, the fully digital, one-stop-shop experience means you don’t need to worry about mailing or time zones – the users have everything they need.
Full transparency
With a fully digital plan, employees and investors have 24/7 access to their awards. Anytime, anywhere. What they have and what it’s worth – it’s at their fingertips.
Once they’re logged in, you don’t need to do anything to convince them how valuable your stock plan is – the portal has a wide range of features that lets the participant know.
An up-to-date stock price is utilized throughout, updating the value of the participant’s stocks in real-time. Modeling calculators allow the user to calculate potential payouts, taxes, and exchange rates. And if they want to take it offline, all award balances and historical transactions are available in downloadable eStatements.
Fully customizable
There have been a lot of benefits to building our own platform. Of course, we got to build it much more simple than anyone else in the industry. But we also had the chance to make a larger improvement – giving clients their own experience.
Our portal is designed to be an extension of your business, not ours. So, when users enter the portal, they are greeted with a look and feel that is tailored to your company. Not just your logos, images, and colours – but your personalized messaging, news, and updates.
Again, it goes back to our philosophy of simplicity – instead of users adapting to an unfamiliar product, they immediately recognise and trust it.
And, of course, even though we are experts in equity compensation – you’re experts in your participants. You know exactly what they need to see and hear.
When you work with Global Shares, you’re not just working with another business. You’re expanding your team. We work closely with all our clients, with our full team of experts and support staff at their disposal. And our employee portal reflects that.
We didn’t build the portal with ourselves in mind, but rather the participants and clients. We aimed for simplicity, and our Product Roadmap is constantly filled with improvements and leaps forward to keep making it even simpler. Contact us today for a no-obligation, free demo of our platform to see how you can use it to boost employee engagement.
To read more about why more employee-owned companies are needed and how we can work with you, click here.
