Love the story about Pensord staff sharing in the successful turnaround - and sale - of the business through the Enterprise Management Incentive scheme set up by former chief executive Tony Jones.

It reminded me of an earlier blog post inspired by the set-up at John Lewis, where employees across-the-board are rewarded depending upon the group's results. It seems clear to me that some sort of inclusive reward scheme has to be preferable and more beneficial than one where only the top layer of people benefit and the worker bees should somehow be thankful for continued employment.

Having once been employed in a role that involved busting my metaphorical balls in the certain knowledge that the ineffective director positioned above my team and I would be picking up an entirely unwarranted bonus as a result, I can testify to the deeply demotivating effects of selective schemes.

While doing a bit of digging around for some facts to back up this viewpoint, I came across an interesting article from last year in Human Resources magazine, one of our sister titles here at Haymarket. It explores a major survey of more than 3,000 individuals carried out on behalf of Computershare by the London School of Economics.

These were the headline results that backed up the efficacy of share plans:

• Members are more likely to 'go the extra mile' every day
• The bigger the plan contribution, the bigger the effect
• Colleague case studies and anecdotes are far more likely to make people join a plan than standard HR benefit messages
• Many members belong even though they don't understand the mechanisms of the plan
• The main reason for not joining is affordability
• Members are more likely than non-members to rate their work effort higher than average

Some of the stats about reduced levels of absenteeism were very interesting, too.

While share schemes may not always be appropriate, or even possible, finding the right way to incentivise and reward employees must surely be more important than ever for business owners who want to get the best out of their people and the best results for their business.