EY powered Rapid Transformation at English Tea Shop
‘English Tea Shop Organic’ (ETS) brand of Amazon Trading Ltd., established in 2010, has been on a truly transformative journey since implementing a company- wide open book management programme in 2015. This was followed by a unique Employee Share Option Plan (ESOP) embarked in 2019 to help build a ‘significantly employee-owned organisation’.
The ESOP’s Phase 1 in 2019 saw the company granting 15% of the equity stake to employees. ETS just announced the launch of the second phase of the ESOP, increasing the shares allocated to employees up to 30%, thus accelerating the journey of making the company a significantly employee-owned business. Moving towards this model is already paying rich dividends along with an array of benefits for its eligible employees, with the company successfully withstanding the impact of Covid-19, showing solid resilience and rapid growth.
ETS’s aspirations of doing things differently by putting purpose and wellbeing for people at the core of its strategy further flourished with a solid partnership with Employee Share Ownership Plan (ESOP) specialists of Ernst & Young as advisors. The company’s mantra of “Love & Prosperity through Community” has acted as a blueprint on its road to success in specialty and natural food markets in over 50 countries.
The ETS ESOP was a custom-made effort by EY to build an inclusive culture and to express good faith through recognising and rewarding employee efforts by allocating equity ownership in the company considering their good standing tenure of service, individual performance and level of significance in contributing to the organization’s wealth creation. The initiative also opened doors for the voice of the staff to be represented at the board level. This will further enable the company to take difficult decisions such as foregoing short-term benefits to achieve longer-term objectives, with wider support.