Time To Dump The ‘Eat What You Kill’ Compensation Model

It’s surprising how often we see professional services firms get in their own way when it comes to driving new business and deepening partnerships with existing clients.

A primary culprit for this is outdated compensation practices that reward individuals over the team. This approach may have worked well 10 or 20 years ago but is no longer aligned with the need for services firms to harness all of their internal resources to better serve their increasingly global and complex clientele. READ MORE

25 highest paid hedge fund managers made $32 billion in 2020, a new record

The 25 highest paid hedge fund managers made a record $32 billion in 2020, up more than 50% over 2019, according to Institutional Investor’s Rich List. READ MORE

Publix joins a growing list of grocers offering incentives for workers to get vaccinated

Publix joined a growing list of US grocers and retailers offering incentives to workers who get the Covid-19 vaccine.

The popular Southern supermarket chain said it is offering its employees $125 gift cards when they sign up and show proof of vaccination. READ MORE

Retail giants like Walmart, Amazon, and Kroger are firing shots over rivals' minimum wages.

Massive retailers have stayed mostly quiet about looming minimum wage increases. 

But they have more to say when it comes to taking shots at the competition. 

When Walmart announced on Thursday it was raising some workers' wages, rival grocery chain Kroger was quick to have a response.  READ MORE

Google to evaluate executives on diversity and inclusion

Alphabet Inc's Google will evaluate the performance of its vice presidents and above on team diversity and inclusion starting this year, the company said on Friday in one of several responses to concerns about its treatment of a Black scientist.

Timnit Gebru, co-leader of Google's ethical artificial intelligence research team, said in December that Google abruptly fired her after she criticized its diversity efforts and threatened to resign. READ MORE

Equity compensation in a pandemic world

COVID-19 has impacted every company. Whether it is a direct impact on short or even long-term revenues or disruption to day-to-day operations, the pandemic's reach is vast. Most businesses have been forced to adapt in some way. For many, it has been a change in where or how they get work done. For some, it is a complete re-imagining of their value proposition to meet wholly new customer needs.

At the center of this period of disruption, and inseparable from your company's ability to navigate it successfully, are your employees. READ MORE

State Individual Income Tax Rates and Brackets for 2021

Individual income taxes are a major source of state government revenue, accounting for 38 percent of state tax collections.[1] Their prominence in public policy considerations is further enhanced in that individuals are actively responsible for filing their income taxes, in contrast to the indirect payment of sales and excise taxes. READ MORE

Walmart just boosted pay to $15. It's not what you think

Walmart announced pay bumps Thursday that will bring its average hourly wage to over $15 an hour. But the move still falls short of the $15 minimum wage announced by some of its largest competitors.

Walmart, America's largest private employer, said it will raise wages for 425,000 US workers -- more than a fourth of its workforce -- to at least $13 an hour. READ MORE

Executive compensation: 2021 and beyond

COVID-19 is causing “unprecedented, negative economic impacts in an accelerated fashion,” comments Alvarez & Marsal. 

“Many experts, furthermore, believe that the coronavirus crisis is just getting started, and that the countermeasures that are causing such negative economic impacts may last not for weeks, but for months or longer. Whether engaged in the airline, hotel, restaurant, physical fitness, cruise line, retail, oil and gas, or any other industry, significant impacts will flow through all sectors, with few, if any, insulated from the downturn.” READ MORE

How to design CEO pay to punish iniquity, not just reward virtue

IF BUSINESS HAD a Moses, “Thou shalt link pay to performance” would be on his tablet. Compensation committees have, however, tended to stick to a narrow reading of the commandment. Whereas they reward good behavior, deterring the bad is an afterthought. Worried that this may lead bosses to adopt a mentality of “heads we win, tails shareholders lose”, boards are rethinking their priorities—partly in response to pressure from regulators and investors, but also to shifting social winds. Perfectly balanced incentives remain as elusive as the promised land. Still, measures designed to ensure that misconduct does not pay are becoming central to the debate about how to craft bosses’ salary plans. READ MORE

Gender pay gap persists even at executive level, new study finds

Even women who climb their way to corporate America's highest ranks are paid less than their male counterparts, new research confirms.

The highest-paid senior executive women earned 84.6 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts in 2019, according to a study of corporate disclosures released Wednesday by Morningstar Inc., a financial services research firm. READ MORE

A critical look at pandemic-related executive compensation changes

With the 2021 proxy season underway, a new analysis reveals some telling findings as to what impact proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services will have on say-on-pay concerning executive compensation actions made in response to the coronavirus pandemic. READ MORE

Kroger will close more stores over hazard pay laws for workers

Kroger will close two stores in Seattle over the city's $4-an-hour hazard pay requirement for grocery workers, an escalation of the grocery chain's push against newly-passed hazard pay laws growing on the West Coast. READ MORE

Biden’s $15 wage proposal: Job killer or a boon for workers?

President Joe Biden’s effort to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour could provide a welcome opportunity for someone like Cristian Cardona, a 21-year-old fast food worker. Cardona would love to earn enough to afford to move out of his parents’ house in Orlando, Florida, and maybe scrape together money for college.

More than 1,000 miles away in Detroit, Nya Marshall worries that a $15 minimum wage would drive up her labor costs and perhaps force her to close her 2-year-old restaurant, already under strain from the viral pandemic. READ MORE

Insiders at COVID-19 vaccine makers sold nearly $500M of stock last year

Executives and directors at Pfizer Inc., Moderna Inc. and other companies developing Covid-19 vaccines sold approximately $496 million of stock last year, reaping rewards of positive vaccine developments that drove up the value of the drugmakers’ shares. READ MORE

IRS Clarifies Tax on Executive Pay at Nonprofit Organizations

The Department of the Treasury and the IRS published a final rule on Jan. 19 to help tax-exempt not-for-profit organizations comply with the excise tax on pay considered to be excessive under Section 4960 of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC). READ MORE

How performance-based pay can drive up executive compensation

An increasing focus on performance-based pay and long-term incentives is driving up CEO salaries in japan.

In fiscal year 2019 alone, CEOs saw total pay jump by a huge 20.5 percent, according to a study by Willis Towers Watson (WTW), published at the end of last year. This was, say the study authors, ‘driven by a significant expansion of long-term incentives’ in Japanese pay structures. It also represents a huge jump on the 3.3 percent rise the year before. READ MORE

Bezos Reclaims Title of World’s Richest After Musk Slips

Elon Musk’s reign as the the world’s richest person was brief.

Tesla Inc. shares slid 2.4% on Tuesday, erasing $4.6 billion from its chief executive officer’s fortune and knocking him from the top spot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index ranking. READ MORE

GE Is Blasted for Revamping Culp’s Pay Package Amid Struggles

A labor-affiliated investor group blasted General Electric Co. for approving a restructured compensation plan last year that lowered the bar for Chief Executive Officer Larry Culp to potentially collect more than $230 million.

The manufacturer has faced a performance and operational crisis due to “years of poor board oversight,” CtW Investment Group Executive Director Dieter Waizenegger said Tuesday in a letter to GE director Risa Lavizzo-Mourey. The group called on GE’s board to permanently separate the CEO and chairman roles and refrain from re-nominating the five members of the executive compensation committee for approving the pay plan. READ MORE

Evidence-Based Performance Management

Performance management is one of the most talked about and written about topics within talent management. Periodically, the practitioner literature contains numerous articles about “new” strategies for doing performance management effectively. Despite that, it is one of the two elements of talent management that are viewed most negatively by both employees and managers. Rewards management is the other. READ MORE