Employee Share Ownership Schemes

It’s natural that as an employer you’d want to attract and retain the best talent at your company and with the right employee share ownership scheme you can do just that.

Incentivising, rewarding and aiding recruitment are all strong reasons to introduce an employee share scheme.

There are many different types of employee share ownership schemes and each will have an impact on your employee engagement as well as your tax contribution. The option you choose depends on a variety of factors such as company size, company wealth, culture, employee retention and other areas.

We’ll discuss with you the advantages and disadvantages of each of the options as well as help your company implement the appropriate scheme.

How we set up the right employee share scheme for your company

There are three key steps we take when implementing the right scheme.

Design phase

• Together we complete a questionnaire designed to uncover your aims and objectives of what you want from an incentive scheme
• We then prepare a summary document outlining which scheme would work best to achieve this.

Implementation phase

• We provide you with a presentation to explain the final scheme (we can even present it to your key people on your behalf)
• We liaise and input the key details with your lawyers who prepare any legal documentation required for implementation
• For certain tax advantaged schemes, we prepare the necessary paperwork and liaise with HMRC.

Ongoing support

• This is often overlooked and is critical for the ongoing success of your incentive scheme. On your behalf, we regularly engage with your employees to ensure the implemented scheme is achieving its desired objectives
• Where required, prepare annual returns to HMRC.

What share scheme is right for your business?

Although it’s one method, rewarding your best people doesn’t necessarily mean increasing salaries. There are a range of different share schemes we will discuss with you, including:

• Share options
• Enterprise Management Incentives (or EMI schemes)
• Freezer shares (or Growth shares)
• Gift of shares.

To find out more about these different types of schemes you can read our article:

We recommend that anyone considering using a share scheme in their business considers answers to the following questions.

• Are you looking to offer a scheme to all employees?
• Do you want your employees to have equity now (rather than a later time)?
• Do you know what actions or behaviours are you trying to reward through this scheme? (For example staff retention, recruitment or productivity)?
• Do you want your employees to ultimately take over the business?
• Have you got any existing share schemes in place?

Get started

If you would like to speak with one of our experts on employee share ownerships schemes then please get in touch with us here.