Friday, November 2, 2018

Google Workers Fume Over Executives’ Payouts After Sexual Misconduct Claims

SAN FRANCISCO — At Google’s weekly staff meeting Thursday, the top question employees voted to ask Larry Page, a co-founder, and Sundar Pichai, the chief executive, was one about sexual harassment.
“Multiple company actions strongly indicate that protection of powerful abusers is literally and figuratively more valuable to the company than the well-being of their victims,” read the question, which was displayed at the meeting, according to people who attended. “What concrete and meaningful actions will be taken to turn this around?”
The query was part of an outpouring from Google employees after a New York Times article published Thursday reported how the company had paid millions of dollars in exit packages to male executives accused of misconduct and stayed silent about their transgressions. In the case of Andy Rubin, creator of Android mobile software, the company gave him a $90 million exit package even after Google had concluded that a misconduct claim against him was credible.
By Daisuke Wakabayashi and Kate Conger, New York Times
Read more here.

Fed Proposes Looser Rules for Large U.S. Banks

"The Federal Reserve announced one of the most significant rollbacks of bank rules since President Trump took office," confirms the Wall Street Journal (Oct. 31, Tracy), "with a proposal for looser capital and liquidity requirements for large U.S. lenders." The changes would impact such big U.S. lenders as Capital One Financial Corp., U.S. Bancorp, and over a dozen others. The largest U.S. banks, most notably JPMorgan Chase & Co., would not see any significant rule changes. Approved by a 3-1 vote at a meeting of the central bank's governing board, the draft proposal would divide big banks into four categories based on their size and other risk factors. The proposals received mixed reviews from banks. While some trade groups applauded it, Bank Policy Institute President Greg Baer lamented that the proposal "does not do enough to tailor regulations."

NACD Directors Daily. November 1 2018.

Read more here.

Tuesday, September 4, 2018

American CEO Pay Is Soaring, But the Gender Pay Gap Is Drawing the Rage

Heading into 2018, corporate ­leaders braced for ­public backlash: For the first time, thousands of ­publicly traded U.S. com­panies would be required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to disclose how much their chief executive officers made compared with their median workers.

Executive compensation has soared about 1,000 percent since 1978, while real wages for most Americans are up about 11 percent, according to an Aug. 16 report from the Economic Policy Institute. Putting a number to that differential was expected to cause outraged headlines and trigger criticism from investors and consumers on social media. Human resource chiefs, meanwhile, worried the disclosures would sow discontent among the rank and file, particularly those paid even less than the median.

By Anders Melin. Bloomgberg Businesweek.

Read more here.

Monday, August 13, 2018

Will 2019 Be the Year that Salary Increases Actually Increase?


Salary increases over the past five years have been steady at roughly 3% per year, even as inflation has varied considerably over the same time period. Although companies have raised merit budgets compared to the recession years of 2009 – 2011, pay changes have not recovered to pre-recession levels. Prior to the recession, salary budget increases ranged from 3.8% to 4.6% during 1999 – 2008 (World at Work Annual Salary Budget Surveys).

Are there reasons to believe that 2019 may finally be different? A recently published World at Work survey of salary increases projected that the average salary increases across all employee types will be 3.2% for 2019. It is worth noting that while this survey had a robust data set of about 5,500 submissions, the survey closed in May 2018. This means that participants in the survey were estimating their 2019 increases well in advance, and the actual pay changes may be different, as there is still a lot of time remaining in 2018.

In spite of near record low levels of unemployment and the recent passage of sweeping tax reform, projected pay changes for 2019 are not all that different from the 3.1% average increase that workers received in 2018. Inflation rates are on an upward trend in recent years, so the real annual pay increases when inflation is factored in are quite small. In fact, the inflation rate for the 12 months ended in June 2018 was 2.9%, so when compared to 2018’s average pay increase of 3.1%, that comes out to a real pay increase of just 0.2%.

The table below shows the average pay increases for each employee type since 2009 compared to annual inflation levels:


Sources: World at Work Annual Salary Budget Surveys 2009 2018 and the Bureau of Labor Statistics

The chart above shows a graphical comparison of salary increases to increases adjusted for inflation. Salary increases have shown little variance over the decade, hovering near 3%. When salary increases are adjusted for inflation, a totally different picture is shown. Real pay increases (after adjustment for inflation) have actually been closer to 1% with a few exceptions. It is worth noting that in 2011, the real pay increase was actually -0.4%, which means that many workers’ buying power diminished, despite receiving a pay increase.

Decade
Average Real Salary Increase
1980s
2.12%
1990s
1.47%
2000s
1.22%
2010s
1.16%
The table to the left shows that real pay increases over the last decade have been quite low relative to historic levels. The Economic Research Institute (ERI) recently posted an analysis of how real salary increases have varied over the past several decades, calculated as the percentage of salary increase budgets less the percentage change in the CPI through 2016. The results show that real pay increases have been declining, and are down nearly a full percentage point since the 1980s.

If pay raises aren’t doing much to outpace inflation, workers may view their compensation packages as stale and may seek better pay elsewhere — especially during periods of low unemployment. A May 2018 survey of over 1,000 workers in sales, office, management and professional occupations by Accounting Principals and Ajilon Research & Insights found that 43% of respondents would be enticed to leave their company if offered better pay by another company. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the survey found that workers aged 18 to 25 were most likely to leave for increased pay, while those over 55 were the least likely. Additionally, the unemployment levels for professional and managerial employees are low compared to other employee classifications, which suggests that these positions have ample opportunities to change jobs for better pay opportunities.

Current unemployment levels are quite low, no matter which measure is used. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the June 2018 U-3 (official unemployment rate) was 4.0%, while the U-6 (sometimes called the “real” unemployment rate) was 7.8%. In addition to metrics like the U-3 and U-6 unemployment rates, other metrics point to a tight labor market. In May 2018, the number of job openings was greater than the number of job seekers for the first time ever, with a ratio of 0.9 unemployed workers per job opening.

While pay increases in 2019 are projected to be the largest in the past decade, they are only slightly larger than in 2018. With low unemployment levels and the possibility that upward trends in inflation continue through the remainder of 2018, there are reasons to speculate that pay increases may be greater than the early survey results would indicate. We would not be surprised if pay increases for 2019 end up being at or above 3.5%, rather than the 3.2% indicated by the World at Work survey.

Pay Strategies for Companies Going Forward
Companies may consider different approaches as the pace of compensation changes picks up. 
1.     Employers should consider potential wage changes differently for different segments of their workforce.  The historical data suggests that higher-paid jobs have seen greater pay increases than lower-paid jobs.  Whether this is a socially appropriate strategy is a separate question.
2.     Track new hire rates in comparison to wages paid to current employees. You might see signs of increasing wages that should be reflected in next year’s merit budget. There are a few software programs such as PayFactors that can provide more current pay data than salary surveys.
3.     Companies should ensure their salary management systems are externally competitive. No organization wants to lose its high performers to competitors because its pay isn’t competitive with the market. Target your high performers for higher increases.
4.     This is a great time for companies to consider a variable or incentive pay plan to complement their base pay programs. Utilizing incentive pay has the advantages of not increasing fixed costs and ties potential rewards to desirable business outcomes.
5.     Although competitive wages are certainly an important reason employees remain with organizations, they are not the only reason. Companies should consider enhancing their efforts in career growth and performance management, building an engaging company culture, and providing work/life balance.  These factors are most significant in retaining employees.

Dan Steele and Joe Kager of the POE Group.

Friday, July 27, 2018

Reflection on Year One of the CEO Pay Ratio Disclosure


Now that the majority of companies have filed their first proxy statement containing the infamous CEO pay ratio disclosure, what have we learned? The answer may be best summed up by Equilar’s Dan Marcec, who said that the disclosures are “not telling us any more about income inequality that we didn’t already know.” Given that proponents of the pay ratio disclosure intended for it to shine a light on CEO pay practices and possibly lead to executive compensation reform, the rule may have missed the mark.

The SEC stated that the rule was “designed to allow shareholders to better understand and assess a particular registrant’s compensation practices and pay ratio disclosures rather than to facilitate a comparison of this information from one registrant to another.” The rule may have failed in this regard as well, since very little can be learned about compensation practices at a given company based on its disclosure, which often consists of just a few sentences. In addition, the lack of standardization in how the ratio is actually calculated makes it difficult to determine what is actually revealed in the disclosure. The SEC gave broad latitude in its final ruling on the important pay calculation for the median employee. Furthermore, the nature of a particular organization’s workforce can influence the ratio significantly, especially if it employs a significant number of part-time, seasonal, or non-U.S. workers. Finally, the most common application of this year’s first round of disclosures was to compare companies to their industry or geographic peers – an outcome that was unintended by the SEC.

The main outcome from the first round of CEO pay ratio disclosures may have been a few somewhat interesting news stories related to companies that had surprisingly high ratios. For example, the toymaker Mattel’s proxy disclosed that the company’s CEO was paid 4,987 times the compensation of its median employee. Margo Georgiadis was named Mattel’s CEO in February 2017, and the majority of her $31.28 million in 2017 compensation was composed of one-time equity grants related to her hire. In reality, she didn’t actually receive anywhere near $31.28 million in compensation for 2017, as the equity grants were subject to both time- and performance-based vesting conditions. In fact, these equity grants were largely forfeited, as she resigned from Mattel in April 2018 to “pursue a new opportunity.” 

Another effect of the recent CEO pay ratios has been the introduction of yet more tax proposals. For example, California Senate Bill 1398, introduced by State Senator Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), would create an upward-scaling state corporate income tax rate. The proposal would increase corporate taxes from the current rate of 8.84 percent up to 13 percent for public companies with pay ratios exceeding 300:1. Interestingly, this proposed bill would result in increased taxes for companies with any ratio exceeding 50:1, which would be a significant portion of all public companies. The proposed schedule is as follows:

Pay Ratio
State Tax Rate
Zero to 50
8.84%
50 to 100
10%
100 to 200
11%
200 to 300
12%
Over 300
13%

So far, the only location that has actually passed legislation to increase taxes for companies with high pay ratios is Portland, Oregon. Other states have proposals pending, but like the one in California, they are unlikely to pass.

It will be interesting to see if the CEO pay ratio is here to stay, and if so, how it may evolve over time. We would suggest a few changes to the calculation approach:

1.     Exclude Non-U.S. Employees from the Median Employee Calculation.  The difference in pay practices in other countries can be significant. If the idea is to understand pay practices in U.S. companies, this could help reduce the noise in the calculation. In their proxies this year, many firms with significant employee populations outside the U.S. provided a supplemental calculation that excluded non-U.S. workers.

2.     Employ Realized Pay Rather than Summary Compensation Table (SCT) Pay in the Calculation.  Realized pay is similar to W-2 reported compensation and is a better comparison. SCT pay for executives accounts for equity compensation through accounting rules at the time of grant and has little relationship to pay actually received. 

3.     Standardize the Compensation Calculation for the Median Employee.  The discretion that the SEC provided to companies in calculating the pay of the median employee led to difficulty in making even common-sense comparisons among companies within the same industry. 
It certainly seems like there could be modifications regarding how to calculate the pay ratio. This would help to standardize the process and make the ratio more meaningful for comparison purposes.

Dan Steele and Joe Kager of the POE Group.