Case Study: Josie Weston, Enhanced

The very nature of employee ownership provides all staff with a stake and say, creating a workforce of employee owners overnight. There’s no pre-determined path or ‘right way’ to be a great employee owner. But there are plenty of examples across our community of what excellence and best practice like. 

Being crowned ‘Employee Owner of the Year’ at the 2025 UK Employee Ownership Awards served to recognise Josie Weston’s contributions inside her business, Enhanced, as well as showcase to the wider EO world another example of how to go above and beyond. 

An Inspiration from Day One

Josie first joined Enhanced, Dorset-based  provider of IT support and services, in June 2019. As Service Delivery Manager, she was tasked with overseeing customer satisfaction, running service reviews, acting as the hub between clients and internal teams. But almost immediately, it became clear her impact would stretch far beyond day-to-day operations. 

Josie has a talent that’s difficult to put into a job description. Customers can be open and honest with her as they know she respects the benefit of direct communication, while colleagues feel comfortable sharing with her, confident their views are respected and that she’ll champion their voice. And somewhere in the middle of those conversations, she spots the thread that needs pulling. She asks careful, well-timed questions, bringing clarity without ever being blunt, and has an innate sense for the moment when it’s time to stop talking and simply get on with it.

Within months of joining, customers were telling the business Josie made them feel truly understood and, internally, she became the person teams looked to when something needed smoothing out or explaining. Josie’s proximity resulted in turning insight into actions that were always underpinned with purpose. All this led to a phrase that’s still used by colleagues: “the Josie effect”. 

Josie became a Trustee from day one of Enhanced becoming an EOT, putting her at the centre of how the business made decisions and disseminated information. This responsibility laid the groundwork that led to her sector recognition. 

A Business at a Crossroads

Three years after Josie joined, Enhanced reached a pivotal moment. Founders Simon White and Jeremy Gill had a choice to make about the future of their business. They weren’t short of options – indeed, there was even a private sale offer on the table – but something about a traditional acquisition felt wrong. In pursuing this route, Enhanced would likely lose its identity, tight-knit culture, independence, and sense of community that had grown stronger year on year.

But something clicked when Simon and Jeremy learned about a fellow business owner who’d transitioned to employee ownership. Here was a win-win solution that would enable them to protect and preserve the essence of the business whilst creating a pathway for long-term sustainability. Crucially, it also meant handing Enhanced’s future to the people who showed up every day to make it work.

The business officially became an Employee Ownership Trust (EOT) in March 2022. As is often the case, it didn’t make a dramatic change in how people behaved overnight, but it did create a new kind of clarity. As the business now belonged to everyone, every decision would ripple out to colleagues directly. This sense of shared responsibility needed a voice strong enough to hold the culture together as it evolved and EO became embedded. It should come as no surprise to discover that Josie quickly became one of the defining voices of that transition and beyond.

Turning EO into Something Real

Changing a business structure is one thing, ensuring people feel that change is another. From the get-go, Josie took it upon herself to make employee ownership feel lived in and understandable. She threw herself into a mix of eoa events and locally organised events from other EO businesses, absorbing what other businesses had learned, asking plenty of questions, and making new connections in the process. A standout was a conversation with fellow eoa member Riverford Organic Farmers. She asked about their council rules and, in the true spirit of the EO community, they were only too happy to share. Those notes went on to shape Enhanced’s own council role descriptions, charting a line from Josie’s curiosity to organisational change.

Inside the business itself, she helped colleagues make sense of what it meant to be an employee owner. This wasn’t achieved by the usual methods of slide decks and speeches seen inside corporate business structures. Instead, Josie had honest, open conversations, creating connections, providing clarity, and all the while bringing her trademark attention to detail to the table. Her emphasis on transparency and inclusion made her a natural bridge between teams, leadership, and trustees.

Josie was the natural choice to help tell Enhanced’s story during a panel session at the 2025 eoa Annual Conference. For anyone who attended the ‘Early EO Lessons From a Business That’s Been There’ session, you’ll already know Josie told the story with honesty, downplayed her own role, and left the room a little brighter than she found it.

Building Engagement, One Conversation at a Time

Enthusiasm is a powerful motivator in the workplace but, alone, it’s not enough for people to follow. That’s why Josie creates structures that support enthusiasm, enabling it to inform great work and act as the lifeblood of Enhanced’s culture. A great example is the ‘EO Viva Engage’ she introduced to offer employee voice a permanent home within the business. Her quarterly EO bullet in does something similar, stitching the journey together so no one feels like decisions are happening behind closed doors.

When the Employee Council was relaunched, she helped bring order where it was needed with clear role descriptions, proper constituencies, and meetings with agendas to ensure they didn’t drift. She and the Head of People, Laura Elford, also created a ‘Measures of Success’ document to ensure the council always had direction and purpose. 

But one of her boldest moves was inviting the CFO to present financial content to the council. Understandably, some members were hesitant at first as finance can feel intimidating, and transparency in this area where little had existed before can feel overwhelming. But Josie saw the bigger picture; if the council was going to be truly representative for all employee owners and work in their best interest, it needed to understand the business from the inside out. As a result, people felt more empowered and more confidently contributed because they understood the levers behind the numbers.

Head of People Laura Elford describes Josie’s approach as “magic”, not in the whimsical sense of the word, but in the way she adapts to whoever’s in front of her and, always, with her values front and centre.  

Outcomes That Can Be Seen & Felt

A thriving, inclusive culture is one of the gold standards by which employee owned businesses are measured – and rightly so. But it’s often easy to talk about culture. It’s harder to point to something tangible and say it changed because direct action taken by the business or by champions like Josie driving meaningful and measurable impacts.

One of the clearest outcomes of Enhanced’s EO journey has been in how customers view the business. Many had already experienced rocky transitions when the IT suppliers were acquired with the typical outcomes to match (service dips, familiar faces disappearing, a faded personal touch). Yet when Enhanced became employee owned, customers saw only reassurance. For many newly transitioned EO businesses, the process oftens brings them closer to their clients and customers. 

Josie played a key role in communicating this message. Customers already trusted her judgement so, when she talked to them about how EO would protect service, stabilise the team, and keep values intact, they believe her. As a result, several customers now cite Enhanced’s EO status as one of the reasons they remain loyal. 

Internally, a milestone moment arrived when the Employee Council was given the final say in how the annual pay increase would be awarded. It’s an example where EO went above and beyond symbolic gestures and demonstrated how employees had gained real authority. With Josie leading the charge here, the process was handled with the level of sensitivity and consideration required of such a big decision. The transparency and fairness it helped codify within the business strengthened trust in a way no announcement alone ever could.

Going Above & Beyond

Josie has a habit of doing more than her role requires. She doesn’t do it for recognition, often shying away from the spotlight, but because she cares about the businesses and the people within it.

She’s become a familiar face in the wider EO community as a peer who’s keen to share and always genuinely curious about what others have learned. She led the Enhanced’s ‘EO Smile’ celebration as part of the 2025 EO Day celebration, folding it into a meeting so it became reflective and shared. The woodfired pizza van she booked afterwards also helped people kick back, relax, and acknowledge how far they’d all come together. 

With Josie continuing to demonstrate what an award-winning employee owner looks like, Enhanced still have plenty of exciting places to go.

Enter the Employee Ownership Awards 2026 here.