EY powers rapid transformation at English Tea Shop Organic using full ESOP model

The fireside chat announcing the second phase of the ETS ESOP - Arjuna Herath, Senior Partner and Head of Consulting, Ernst & Young, Sri Lanka and Maldives (left) and Niluza Badurdeen, Director Strategy, English Tea Shop Organic  

‘English Tea Shop Organic’ (ETS) brand of Amazon Trading Ltd., established in 2010, has been on a transformative journey since implementing a company-wide open book management program in 2015. 
This was followed by a uniqueEmployee Share Option Plan (ESOP)embarked in 2019 to help build a ‘significantly employee-owned organization’. 
ETS says it believes employees empowered through open book management practices typically think, feel, and act like business owners and help create winning organizations. 
Hence, its employees engage in analyzing and interpreting financial statements at their weekly huddles and also participate in high-involvement scenario planning, problem-solving mini-games and setting up innovative scoreboards that help enhance business performance.
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 percent, thus accelerating the journey of making the company a significantly 
employee-owned business. 
The benefits of moving towards thismodel arealready paying rich dividends, with the company successfully withstanding the impact of Covid-19,showing solid resilience and growing rapidly.
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(EY) 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. 
ETS has won leading international awards for its sustainability approach, including the 2020 Queen’s Award for Sustainability (UK)and the Great Game of Business (USA) All-Star International Champion in 2020. The company continues to achieve many accolades owing to its ambitious, transformative journey to inspire its tea loving community.
The ETS ESOP was a custom-made effort by EY to build an inclusive culture and to express good faith through recognizing and rewarding staff efforts byallocating 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. 
At a recent fireside chat announcing the second phase of the ESOP, Ernst & YoungSenior Partner and Consulting Head for Sri Lanka and Maldives Arjuna Herath commented: “Where majority of the companies allocate around 5% - 10% of their total issued share capital towards share-based incentive plans, ETS has taken the initiative of allocating a generous 30% of the total issued share capital of the company to a Trust, of which beneficiaries are employees, at zero cost, upholding its commitment to its founding purpose. It’s even more remarkable that even their shop-floor level employees qualify for this scheme after completing just one year of service!”.
Participating in the fireside chat, ETS’s Director Strategy, Niluza Badurdeen, argued that “One of the planet’s most pressing challenges is the rising levels of social inequalities; this is probably the biggest emergency for countries in the global south. A core purpose of ETS is to be a catalystin solving this very problem in our industry. 
The ESOP has helped us get closer to our wealth-sharing endgame of becoming an employee-owned business. By empowering our employees with knowledge and making them business people through our ‘Big Game’, we believe it will truly uplift their passion and commitment in extending great value within our value chain and creating a net positive impact on society and the environment at large.”