Employee share ownership is a powerful way of encouraging employees to think like owners, helping to make businesses more productive and more resilient.  For more about the impact of employee ownership and employee share schemes on business  and employee performance, please look at our summary of recent research findings: Benefits of Employee Share Ownership.  

Share ownership can also have significant tax advantages for companies or employees or both, making it a highly cost-effective way of providing long term reward.  

There are various ways to introduce employee share ownership in a business depending on your particular circumstances and objectives.  

You may be thinking about full employee ownership.  If so, you can find out more about becoming an employee-owned company here.

If you are thinking about more limited employee share ownership, we've produced guides to some of the common approaches, just click on the title to find out more about:

• Enterprise Management Incentives (EMI), also known as EMI Option Plan
• Save As You Earn (SAYE), or SAYE Option Plan
• Share Incentive Plan (SIP)
• Company Share Option Plan (CSOP)
• Unapproved Share Options and Long Term Incentive Plan (LTIP)

The choice of share scheme depends on the degree of employee share ownership you wish to introduce.  You may just want key people to be able to own shares or you may want all employees to become part-owners of the business by introducing an all-employee share scheme.

This is just one of the many issues to think about when choosing the right employee share scheme for your business.  Others include the tax consequences for the business and the employee, and the qualification criteria for particular share plans.  You can get help with making the right choice by looking at our Which Share Scheme? decision-making tools.  These score different share schemes on the key factors to consider when setting up an employee share plan.

If you or your client is a US company wanting a stock option plan for employees in the UK, look at our guide to UK Share Plans for US Companies.

There's a lot of technical language associated with employee share ownership schemes so you can find definitions of the key terms in our Glossary.  We've also provided answers to some Frequently Asked Questions.  There's plenty of other information on our Resources pages, including a short video explaining how employee share ownership works, but please contact us for further information and advice.  We will be happy to have a preliminary discussion without any commitment. 

Select the option below that best represents you to find out more about setting up an employee share plan.