Category: Executive Compensation
How do we incorporate ESG factors into incentive compensation?
In BlackRock Investment Stewardship’s recent commentary, BIS observed that ESG-related metrics have increasingly been incorporated as performance measures in companies’ incentive plans. BIS cited a recent study from the GECN Group, which showed that 67% of companies in the study used ESG measures (but only 56% in the U.S. alone) and that COVID-19 had accelerated the incorporation of ESG factors into incentive plans. Importantly, however, BIS cautioned that, to the extent that companies included sustainability metrics in their incentive plans, they should “be material and aligned with a company’s long-term strategy. It is important that companies using sustainability performance metrics explain carefully the connection between what is being measured and rewarded alongside business goals and long-term performance. Failure to do so may leave companies vulnerable to reputational risks and undermine their sustainability efforts.” How do companies determine which sustainability objectives are most material for them, and how do they transform those goals into measures for purposes of incentive compensation? This new article from consultant Semler Brossy offers some advice. What is the overarching message? “Move carefully, but move.”
SEC proposes a temporary trial to allow offerings of compensatory equity to certain gig workers
The term-end crunch continues! Yesterday, the SEC voted, without an open meeting, to issue two separate proposals to amend Rule 701 and Form S-8, both “substantially informed by public comment” received in response to the SEC’s July 2018 Concept Release on Compensatory Security Offerings and Sales. First, the SEC is proposing new amendments, on a temporary five-year trial basis, that would allow a company to provide equity compensation to a slice of “gig” workers—specifically only “platform workers” who provide services through the company’s technology-based platform—subject to percentage limits (no more than 15% of annual compensation), dollar limits (no more than $75,000 in three years) and other conditions. The proposal is structured as temporary to allow the SEC an opportunity to assess whether issuances are being made for legitimate compensatory purposes and not for capital-raising purposes, whether the issuances benefit companies, platform workers and other investors in the “gig economy,” and whether there are any unintended consequences. To help with that assessment, looking toward an evaluation of whether to make the rule permanent, the SEC will require participating companies to furnish certain information to the SEC at six-month intervals. Second, the SEC is also proposing amendments to Rule 701 and Form S-8 designed to modernize the framework for compensatory securities offerings in light of the significant evolution in compensatory offerings and composition of the workforce since the SEC last substantively amended those regulations. Both proposals will be open for public comment for 60 days.
Happy Thanksgiving!
ISS provides early guidance on changes to executive compensation related to COVID-19
ISS has provided some early guidance regarding how it will view pandemic-related changes to executive compensation as part of its pay-for-performance qualitative evaluation. According to ISS, the guidance was informed by direct discussions with investors as well as the results of its annual policy survey. The guidance is summarized below.
Don’t forget to vote!
Oversight of ESG—ten questions for boards
According to Protiviti, in 2019, 90% of companies in the S&P 500 issued separate sustainability reports—not part of SEC filings—and, as of February 2020, over 1,000 companies with an aggregate market cap of $12 trillion have endorsed the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) recommendations for sustainability disclosure (see this PubCo post and this PubCo post). Similarly, use of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) framework has increased by 180% over the last two years (see this PubCo post). With this heightened focus on sustainability, how can boards best oversee ESG? To that end, in this article, consultant Protiviti offers ten questions about ESG reporting that boards should consider with their management teams.
Corp Fin adds two new CDIs regarding SPACs and COVID-19 benefits
Yesterday, Corp Fin posted two new CDIs, the first relating to SPAC (special purpose acquisition companies) eligibility to use Form S-3 and the second relating to whether COVID-19 benefits should be considered perks.
How has the pandemic affected CEO pay?
In this new study, Equilar and the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford examine how COVID-19 has affected CEO compensation. Are boards focused more on making sure that CEOs have the right incentives to continue their jobs under trying circumstances? After all, in the case of the pandemic, the trying circumstances are not of their own making. Or are boards more inclined to focus on showing the public and other stakeholders, especially employees, that CEOs are “sharing the pain”? CEO pay attracts a lot of attention in ordinary times, but in times of severe economic distress when corporate performance and stock prices plummet and companies engage in substantial layoffs, furloughs and pay cuts for employees—who likewise are not responsible for the economic crisis—CEO pay can attract intense scrutiny. In those circumstances, paying the same or greater levels of CEO comp can seem unfair to the employees and invite shareholder and public criticism. How have boards addressed this issue?
Will companies accede to calls for actions to improve racial and ethnic diversity in hiring and promotion? California considers a new mandate for racial/ethnic board diversity
In this excellent NYT article from early June, the author painfully explores the view of many African-American executives that, notwithstanding the public condemnations of racism by many public companies and the “multimillion-dollar pledges to anti-discrimination efforts and programs to support black businesses,” still, many of these companies “have contributed to systemic inequality, targeted the black community with unhealthy products and services, and failed to hire, promote and fairly compensate black men and women. ‘Corporate America has failed black America,” said [the African-American president of the Ford Foundation]. ‘Even after a generation of Ivy League educations and extraordinary talented African-Americans going into corporate America, we seem to have hit a wall.’” In the article, a number of Black executives offer recommendations for actions companies should take to begin to implement the needed systemic transformation. And now, third parties—from proxy advisors to institutional investors to legislators—are taking steps to induce companies to take some of these actions. Will they make a difference?
What’s on the SEC’s Spring 2020 RegFlex Agenda?
With so much going on in connection with COVID-19 and its impact, it would be easy to overlook the rest of the SEC’s agenda. And it’s a lengthy one. The new Spring Regulatory Flexibility Act Agenda was published at the end of June, so it’s time to look at what’s on deck for the SEC in the coming year or so. (That reference to “on deck” may be the only sports anyone gets this year….) SEC Chair Jay Clayton has repeatedly made clear his intent to make the RegFlex Agenda more realistic, streamlining it to show what the SEC actually expects to take up in the subsequent period. (Clayton has previously said that the short-term agenda signifies rulemakings that the SEC actually planned to pursue in the following 12 months. See this PubCo post and this PubCo post.) The SEC’s Spring 2020 short-term and long-term agendas reflect the Chair’s priorities as of March 31, when the agenda was compiled. What stands out here are the matters that have, somewhat surprisingly, moved up onto the final-rule-stage agenda—think universal proxy—from perpetual residence on the long-term (i.e., the maybe never) agenda.
Is it time for a reimagined compensation committee?
Perhaps during the shutdown, when you’re watching more TV than you might like to admit, you’ve seen some new commercials a bit like this: a happy face-masked employee on the line or in a lab displaying all the sanitizing and other pandemic-related safety precautions that the company is taking to protect the employee’s work environment. Cut to the employee at home with giggling youngsters, illustrating the importance of safety measures at work to protect family at home. Or a company emphasizing the value of its employees in keeping the country moving forward or its employees in lab coats that persevere to find a cure no matter what. Or a shot of employees performing the essential service of implementing safety measures for customers. What’s the point? To drive home that a company that recognizes the value of its employees and manifests such concern for their safety and welfare is a company worth buying from. This new emphasis on employee welfare as a corporate selling point may have been sparked by COVID-19 but, at another level, it may well reflect broader concerns that have been marinating for a while—about the essential value of previously overlooked elements of the workforce, about physical risk allocation, about economic inequity and, to some extent, even about social justice.
How to address some of these concerns related to the workforce—particularly economic inequity—is the subject of a new paper co-authored by former Delaware Chief Justice Leo Strine, “Toward Fair Gainsharing and a Quality Workplace for Employees: How a Reconceived Compensation Committee Might Help Make Corporations More Responsible Employers and Restore Faith in American Capitalism.” The goal is to reimagine the compensation committee so that it becomes the board committee “most deeply engaged in all aspects of the company’s relationship with its workforce,” from retaining and motivating the workforce to achieve the company’s business objectives, to overseeing that the company fulfills its obligations as a responsible employer and, most of all, to positioning the company to “restore fair gainsharing.”
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