Tag: maximizing shareholder value

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.”