DAI Wins Innovations in Employee Ownership Award for 2017

April 07, 2017

DAI was recognized this week as a winner of the 2017 Innovations in Employee Ownership Award by the National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO), a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing unbiased information and research on broad-based employee stock plans.

The Innovations in Employee Ownership Award—administered annually by the NCEO and the Beyster Institute at the Rady School of Business, University of California/San Diego—recognizes employee-owned companies that have demonstrated a commitment to promoting employee ownership through progressively designed stock plans, as well as approaches that engage employees and tie ownership to improved company culture or performance.

The NCEO judges said DAI’s model of 100 percent global employee ownership “allows DAI to better align global development strategy and expansion while allowing employees to share more broadly and globally in the long-term success of the company.”

“We worked hard to make our ownership structure as inclusive as possible, because broad-based ownership will make us a better company and better exponents of the global development mission,” said Joy White, DAI’s Director of Global Employee Ownership, who accepted the award with CFO Mike Jakobowski at the NCEO’s annual conference in Denver, Colorado. “We are delighted to see those efforts recognized.”

DAI has always been employee owned. But following the acquisition of a British firm in 2013, DAI recognized the need to accommodate more global employees as owners. The Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), which owned 100 percent of the company, did not permit employees outside of the United States to participate, so in 2016 DAI launched a new corporate structure that maintains the ESOP for U.S.-based staff and permits all global corporate employees to own shares.

DAI’s ownership plan was recognized last year as the Best Use of a Share Plan in a Private Company by the Global Equity Organization, a professional membership group dedicated to advancing understanding of employee share plans.