Compensate

Aligning Compensation: An investor brief on fair pay and income inequality

More attention needs to be paid to ensuring corporations recognize and reward the value provided by rest of the workforce. This brief from SHARE highlights how often employee performance is overlooked when considering the contributions that a well-compensated CEO provides. The report also looks at ways to elevate the place of the workforce within listed corporations so that boards, executives, and investors can ensure that employees are incentivised.

Global Wage Report 2020–21: Wages and minimum wages in the time of COVID-19

This flagship report from the International Labor Organization (ILO) examines the evolution of real wages and wage trends around the world, including the factors driving wage inequality and the conditions under which minimum wages can reduce inequality. The report presents comprehensive data on levels of minimum wages, their effectiveness, and the number and characteristics of workers paid at or below the minimum. This report will help you to understand the impact of COVID-19 on wage trends and labour; how minimum wages can play a key role in building community resilience and support human-centred recovery after crises; and policy measures to implemenent minimum wages effectively.

Put your money where your values are

Businesses are facing increasing pressure from investors, regulators, and advisers to incentivise performance on environmental, social, and governance issues. This short article from IR Magazine provides a look at efforts to link sustainability-related metrics to executive compensation in North America, Europe, and Asia. It provides example-centered recommendations and insights that will help you to understand emergent trends in executive compensation, as well as advice from corporate leaders.

A Living Wage Roadmap for Large Employers

This guide from Vancity explores their journey towards becoming a certified Living Wage Employer (LEW). It includes details of their 7-step process, identifies leads for spearheading each phase, and lays out the timeline for Vancity's LEW journey. The tangible and actionable content in this guide will especially benefit business leaders, change agents, and procurement personnel who are ready to advance from embracing LEW in principle to enacting it in practice.

The Puzzle of Motivation

In this TED Talk, Dan Pink outlines some key findings of social science experiences focused on the impact of pay-for-performance on task fulfilment. Using the conclusion that pay-for-performance incentives work well for well-defined but not for those that involve more cognitive thought, he suggests that there is a disconnect between business compensation and motivational science. A greater focus on intrinsic motivation within employee compensation structures could yield more effective results over structures that only focus on extrinsic motivations.

How to Tie Executive Compensation to Sustainability

This short article will help you to understand how your organisation can better connect executive compensation with sustainability-related achievements. Instead of focusing on operational metrics, or on efforts far removed from your company's core mission, companies should reward executives for pursuing bold and strategically-aligned sustainable business opportunities.

Making sustainability pay: company examples of ESG incentives

A growing number of companies are linking executive pay to sustainability metrics. This short article from Corporate Citizenship lists recent examples that show how industry leaders are leveraging bonuses and short- and long-term incentive plans to incentivize sustainability-related achievements.

Is it Time to Integrate EESG into Executive Compensation?

There is a growing number of shareholder resolutions requesting the adoption and disclosure of environmental, employee, social, and governance factors into executive compensation. This article will help you to understand why the inclusion of EESG criteria into executive compensation programs is an irreversible trend. It explores key obstacles and opportunities and how to navigate them, and provides advice from global directors and executives who have integrated - or are in the process of integrating - EESG into their compensation plans.

This resource is part of the Salzburg Questions for Corporate Governance series by the Salzburg Global Corporate Governance Forum, and was informed by insights from the Driving Accountability: Integrating EESG into executive compensation program.

E&S Metrics in Executive Compensation: What Do Investors Really Care About?

Investor pressure is increasing for boards to clearly integrate ESG metrics into executive incentive programs, and a growing number of companies are looking to improve their ESG scores with rating agencies and build out more robust ESG programs. This blog article provides a checklist of simple questions that will help you to understand the factors that ESG rating providers (e.g. the MSCI ESG Rating, S&P Global ESG Scores, etc.) consider when evaluating executive compensation.

The "COVID Cut" is Not Enough: Addressing the Negative Social Impacts of Excessive Executive Compensation

This article explains how COVID-19 cuts to executive pay (taken at the base salary level) are a hollow gesture - instead, excess pay to leaders requires wholistic compensation reform to better re-allocate capital. This resource will help you to be understand the capacity of investors to create equitable change around compensation.

Moving Cautiously on ESG Incentives in Compensation

Inquiry and action on how to link ESG metrics with executive compensation (and when) is growing, and this resource from Semler Brossey recommends that boards "move cautiously, but move." It highlights common questions and key steps in the process of linking metrics with compensation, and it can help you to understand what's driving ESG in incentives, including sector-driven strategies and calls for greater diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Paying for net zero: Using incentives to create accountability for climate goals

This report was created to support boards that are considering including carbon targets in executive compensation. A collaboration between PwC and the Leadership Institute at London Business School, it examines whether current practices are meeting investor expectations, as well as the challenges and complexities of including carbon targets in compensation. The report finds that common gaps persist in relation to the degree of transparency of targets, as well as the clarity with which the targets are linked to public-facing decarbonisation goals. To address this issue, the report introduces a four-criteria rubric that can help you to establish credible links between executive compensation and your climate strategy.

Modern Principles for Sensible and Effective Executive Pay

This set of principle from the Aspen Institute will help ensure your organisation aligns executive pay with societal expectations. Specifically, it is written to guide boardroom dialogue on the topic. It includes clear criteria along with a list of key question for each of the five principles covered. This resource will be most useful to your board members and compensation committee.

The Big Benefits of Employee Ownership

This article introduces employee ownership as a wealth-sharing tool. It highlights the growing wealth gap and the potential for increased employee ownership to address this issue while also providing a range of other business benefits. The article will be most useful for bringing new ideas to sustainability practitioners and HR teams concerned with employee compensation.