Accept this piece of candid counsel: If you commonly hate getting out of bed and heading to work, you should find another job. Life’s too short to detest what you do. That sentiment explains why I was stunned to read a recent American Job Quality Study of 18,000 workers, completed by the respected Gallup organization.
It found that only 40% of workers enjoy what the study defines as a “quality job.” It’s a position that offers fair pay and benefits, safe and respectful workplaces, opportunities for growth, a voice in decisions, and sustainable schedules.
Just think: three-of-five workers don’t experience such a job. Across diverse industries, the study highlights significant gaps in job satisfaction and working conditions.
What’s the solution? Increasing the opportunities for workers to become employee-owners through ESOPs and other employee ownership plans.
Decades of data show employee ownership significantly buoys job satisfaction. A new National Bureau of Economic Research study spotlights the two workplaces where employees are happiest. Employee stock ownership plans, or ESOPs, rank first. Not surprisingly, working from home is the other.
This NBER study found that ESOPs boost satisfaction by increasing worker participation on collective workplace or company decisions. That is significant, as both participation and flexibility enhance job satisfaction, having an even greater impact on job satisfaction than work conditions, it concluded.
Through my experience, I can vouch for the validity of the NBER findings, which are underlined by other factors that trigger high job fulfillment at employee-owned companies.
For instance, ESOP employees benefit directly when their company is more profitable – and ESOPs tend to be more profitable than non-ESOPs in comparable businesses. They tend to perform better in terms of sales growth, employment retention, and overall profitability versus their non-ESOP counterparts, research indicates. For instance, ESOPs can boost sales and employment by about 2.3% to 2.4% annually over what would have been expected absent an ESOP.
ESOPs also often register lower turnover rates as well as better retirement savings and benefits that contribute to a more stable workforce. A 2020 Rutgers University study found that employee-owned companies outperformed non-ESOPs in job retention, pay, and workplace health safety throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. ESOPs were three-to-four times more likely to retain staff, less likely to make pay cuts (26.9% vs. 57.3%) and more likely to take protective measures against COVID’s spread.
I’m especially interested in the results of another recent study that highlights how ESOPs can counteract the job dissatisfaction many Millennials and Gen Z workers report. The University of Northern Iowa’s Wilson College of Business project, headed by Rutgers Fellow Andres Cuadros-Meñaca, focused on employees’ first job experience. For young people in their work lives, employee ownership – especially via ESOPs – connected to their working more weeks and more hours and feeling more satisfied with their jobs.
“While I didn’t find evidence that it makes people less likely to look for other jobs while being employed, that increase in job satisfaction is still very meaningful,” maintains Cuadros-Meñaca. The Wilson College of Business has even established the Academic Center for Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing, with Ford Foundation funds.
As a Boomer who’s derived great satisfaction from her 30-year career advising family firms and other companies about employee ownership, I am concerned by the much lower rates of job satisfaction that younger workers exhibit. Millennials, the oldest born in 1981, are now in their 30s and mid-40s; and Gen Z, the oldest of whom are now 28 and in the workforce, together account for more than half of the U.S. employee population.
As Deloitte’s 2025 Global Gen Z and Millennial Survey notes, a strong link exists between the financial insecurity of younger workers and their job satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Financial concerns, in particular a sense they aren’t getting ahead as the generations before them did, are a foundational factor influencing their overall well-being and career attitudes.
Academic researchers David G. Blanchflower and Alex Bryson, documenting this cohort’s sense of career futility, found that for workers under 25, mental health is now so poor they generally are as unhappy as their unemployed counterparts. This is new within the past several years. Bryson has speculated that automated workplaces increasingly have removed a sense of job autonomy, triggering a feeling of being treated as an automaton.
I’m convinced that a powerful counterweight to the sense of dissatisfaction manifested by workers under the age of 45 is a greater participation in ESOPs and employee ownership. Both offer increased involvement in the workplace and the promise of greater wealth creation over the course of their careers.
This explains that when friends or others confide they don’t like going to work, I wish they could be an employee-owner.
