Kickstart: Private equity and employee ownership — the odd couple

The odd couple marriage of private equity and employee ownership — including a recent investment by KKR into Charter Next Generation — is getting some positive national media attention.

In a segment on CBS News Sunday Morning on Feb. 19, Allison Aubrey — also an NPR correspondent — spoke with Charter Next CEO Kathy Bolhous and Charles Marlow, a plant training coordinator, as part of a story on KKR adding employee ownership as part of buying a stake in the Wisconsin company.

The idea behind getting employees their own stake in the company, as KKR’s Pete Stavros says, is to provide incentive for continuous improvement. Those actions improve the company, which improves its value during any future potential sale. On the CBS segment, Stavros notes that his father, a road construction worker, talked about “the need to just work steady, not too fast, not too slow to get in trouble, but just steady.”

With the potential for future payouts, employees can see a reason behind efforts to improve profit. That includes, for instance, cutting scrap by 1 percent — a move that would add $10 million in additional profit.

“We’re going to have to figure out how to get employees to really understand how their day-to-day actions translate into long-term results,” Bolhous tells Aubrey in the report.

Charter Next’s story is told alongside that of C.H.I. Overhead Doors of Arthur, Ill. KKR purchased in the company in 2015, with employees taking a share in its ownership. When it sold in 2022, the average payout to employees was $175,000.

For another take on workers and productivity, you may have seen reports this week out from the largest study on the impact of switching from a five-day workweek to four days a week.

The pilot program in the United Kingdom included 2,900 workers at 61 companies. The results pointed to there being no loss in productivity and in fact there were improvements at some businesses because employees felt more rested and focused during workdays.

Of the 61 companies participating, 56 said they would continue the four-day practice, at least for now.

Each business used its own metrics to measure productivity, but those were the same measurements used previously, Charlotte Lockhart, founder of 4 Day Week Global, one of the organizations behind the study, said in a blog post.

Not every participant chose to create three-day weekends. For some companies, it made more sense to break up the workweek with a Wednesday off, for instance.

“This type of change is quite a lot for many business leaders and requires an agile mindset together with being ready to face a challenge in the business,” Lockhart added.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic showed how vulnerable the U.S. supply chain can be, OEMs and brand owners across a range of end markets have stressed the need for inventory and local production.

That’s especially be true in the medical market, PN’s Sarah Kominek reports.

Risk mitigation is "critical" in health care, Kelly Wessner, sales director of key accounts for Formerra LLC, told Sarah for an overview of the medical market.

You can read her overview of the state of the medical industry here. It includes links to other stories related to health care from this week’s print issue of Plastics News.