Careful about reading too much into "employee ownership". It can be and at least sometimes (I suspect usually, at least in the US) is structured such that it doesn't really work the way you might think.
1) The shares can be non-voting shares. LOL.
2) Only a relatively small portion of the overall "pie" has to go to employees for them to be able to say they're "employee owned". There can still be non-employee owners involved to a large degree.
3) That slice of the pie will tend to be weighted so heavily toward those near the top of the org chart that in practice it may be more like "upper-management owned" anyway.
I think the main reasons companies in the US choose it are:
1) Propaganda. "You're an owner!" It's a way to trick unwise employees into working harder for (effectively) nothing extra, and even into exhorting others to do the same.
2) Probably some kind of tax-avoidance reasons.
3) As a vehicle for a kind of stock-compensation system without having to take the company public or do occasional odd maneuvers with investors for that stock to be de facto liquid for employees.
IME there's zero percent more meaningful "ownership" involved than, say, Google folks who receive stock as part of their comp (and nobody calls Google "employee owned"). It's a misleading name for the structure.