Incentive Plan Goal-Setting: How Flexibility May Mitigate Volatility

Economic volatility, market disruptions and unpredictable performance trends have made executive pay design more complex than ever. Compensation committees and HR leaders face the challenge of creating incentive plans that remain motivating, fair and aligned with shareholder interests — all while accounting for uncertainty.

One of the most critical components of this process is incentive plan goal-setting, which becomes particularly difficult when future outcomes are unclear. With goal-setting top of mind now, we explore practical strategies that organizations can adopt to safeguard incentive plans in uncertain times. READ MORE

For Directors, Pay Is Growing Modestly While Board Duties Get Heavier

Median public company director pay rose a modest 3% in 2025, according to the 27th annual Director Compensation ReportOpen in a new tab produced by the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) and executive compensation advisory firm Pearl Meyer.

The report analyzed compensation and governance practices at 1,400 public companies across 24 industries. Companies were grouped into five size categories based on revenue: micro ($50 million to $500 million), small ($500 million to $1 billion), medium ($1 billion to $2.5 billion), large ($2.5 billion to $10 billion) and top 200 (the 200 largest companies in the S&P 500 by revenue).  READ MORE

Here’s the Minimum Salary Required To Be Considered a Wealthy Gen Zer in 2026

What does it actually take to be considered “wealthy” these days — especially if you’re Gen Z? With rent prices doing the absolute most and iced lattes somehow costing $8, the definition of rich has gotten fuzzy.

GOBankingRates took a survey of 1,000 Americans (over age 18) and asked them what they considered to be upper class. Over one-third of Gen Z actually believe you need to make just $75,001 to $200,000 to be considered upper class.

Here is a closer look at what experts think puts Gen Zers in “wealthy” territory heading in 2026. READ MORE

Equal Pay Day Meets AI Reality

Equal Pay Day on March 4 carries new weight for employers this year. It’s a day to bring awareness and legitimacy to the ongoing issue of pay inequity and the gender wage gap in the U.S., and a moment for HR leaders to reflect on how they advance fairness and pay equity in compensation decisions.

However, reflection alone is not enough. Compensation decisions now sit at the intersection of heightened regulatory requirements, growing employee expectations for pay transparency and equity, and AI-driven workforce transformation that’s rapidly reshaping job responsibilities and salaries. READ MORE

New DOL rule targets worker misclassification

The U.S. Department of Labor on Thursday unveiled a highly anticipated proposed rule to determine how employers should classify independent contractors.

The proposal would replace a Biden-era rule that made it more challenging for organizations to classify workers as contractors with one similar to what the Trump administration advanced during the president’s first term in office—largely considered a more business-friendly standard. READ MORE

One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Solving Global Sales Comp with Local Insight

Have you ever wondered what it really takes to create a global sales compensation plan that inspires and motivates sellers in different countries across the world? Designing global sales compensation plans for multinational organizations is a complex puzzle filled with unique challenges. When companies settle for a global “one-size-fits-all” approach, sellers can quickly become confused or frustrated — especially when their compensation plan feels out of touch with their local norms. Ultimately, this disconnect typically leaves them unmotivated and disengaged, undermining the very purpose of a sales incentive program. READ MORE

Switching jobs for a significantly higher salary is so 2022. Welcome to the Great Stay

You may remember that strange phase of the labor market after the pandemic that got dubbed The Great Resignation — when employers were hiring like mad, and lots of workers were leaving for better-paying jobs.

They had good reason. According to data from the payroll company ADP (where occasional Marketplace collaborator Nela Richardson is chief economist) back in the first half of 2022, your annual salary went up 8% more if you left your job than if you stayed. READ MORE

Posting a Wide Salary Range Can Deter Women from Applying

Pay transparency laws are spreading fast. As of 2025, 15 U.S. states and Washington, D.C., require employers to disclose salary ranges in job postings, and roughly 60% of postings on Indeed, up from 18% in 2020, now include salary information.

The intent is straightforward: Give workers better information, level the playing field, and help close the persistent pay gaps across gender and race. Yet in most jurisdictions, the laws focus on whether a range is disclosed—not on how wide or narrow it should be—leaving employers substantial discretion. READ MORE

The Psychology Behind Paying Executives to Support Women Leaders

Want more women to want leadership roles at your company? Pay executives to help female employees succeed.

The psychology works like this: When women hear that their organization is committing money to achieving goals on female representation in management—even when that money flows to executives, not to them—they feel more confident that the company will support them if they decide to take on bigger roles, research by Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Edward H. Chang shows. In a field experiment at a global engineering company, almost 12% more women said they aspire to leadership positions when they learned that their employer provides incentive pay to executives for meeting female representation goals, compared to when an employer merely says the goal exists. READ MORE

Big Tech is shelling out up to $1 million for new hires who will never have to write a line of code

Some of the highest-paid tech workers now will never have to write a line of code. And it’s not because their work is being done by AI: Tech companies are shelling out high six-figure salaries for senior communications roles.

Anthropic is hiring for a head of product communications with a listed $400,000 salary; Netflix is looking for a senior director of communications with a salary range of $656,000 to $1.2 million; and OpenAI is seeking a head of infrastructure communications and a head of business communications, both with salary ranges up to $430,000, plus equity. READ MORE

The ‘invisible pay cut’ of return-to-office

As organizations increasingly lean into return-to-office mandates, they are being met with sharp pushback from employees—and growing evidence suggests strict RTO policies could push out an organization’s most valuable talent. Largely, American workers who are resistant to full-time, in-office work decry the lack of flexibility and loss of empowerment.

But there’s another byproduct of return-to-office that may not be on the immediate radar of decision-makers, but could affect engagement and retention in the long term: finances. READ MORE

This wage gap may be why you strain financially to live in your state

American families living in half the country — 25 states — need to earn about $30 an hour, or roughly $53,000 per year after taxes, to make ends meet, according to an analysis from all-in-one finance app platform MoneyLion.

Hawaii requires the highest hourly wage of $69.43 to live, MoneyLion found after calculating each state’s costs of “necessities,” including housing, groceries, utilities, healthcare and transportation, using data from the 2024 Consumer Expenditure Survey. In zero states can a family of four get by earning less than $20 an hour, it said. A family of four is defined as a married couple with children, the oldest child age 6 to 17, it said. READ MORE

Compensation, culture, and cap tables

Build Mode is back. This season we’re breaking down what it really takes to build a world-class founding team starting with your cap table, equity structures, and startup compensation strategy. 

We kick off with Yuri Sagalov, managing director at General Catalyst and former founder, YC partner, and seed investor at Wayfinder Ventures. Yuri has worked with hundreds of pre-seed and seed-stage startups, and he shares practical advice on how early-stage founders should think about startup equity, cap table design, investor selection, and compensation structures from day one.  READ MORE

OpenAI is paying workers $1.5 million in stock-based compensation on average, the highest of any tech startup in history

The ChatGPT maker’s average stock-based compensation hit a whopping $1.5 million among its roughly 4,000 employees in 2025, according to the Wall Street Journal. With a reported $830 billion valuation from its latest funding round, the company ranks among the most valuable private firms ever. An IPO at or near that level could turn thousands of employees into multimillionaires.

This unprecedented employee equity sharing is the highest of any major tech startup in recent history. READ MORE