Incentives or Variable Remuneration (VR) market practices are evolving rapidly due to shifting stakeholder expectations and legislative changes. Using the ASX300 market data in GRG's 2024 Variable Remuneration Guide, we analyse the latest trends and answer common VR questions.
How do retiring owners of private companies enable the company to continue growing, while realising the value of their shareholding without a ready market for the shares? A Succession Employee Share Ownership Plan (SESOP) allows key employees to buy into the company, motivating them to grow its value even as the founder sells down.
As well as increasing long-term alignment of executives, Equity Banks are useful to the executives themselves, shareholders and governance groups – for both listed and unlisted companies.
How should the criteria for ESG – one of the hottest topics for ASX listed companies – be linked to executive remuneration? We observe emerging market practices in Australia and provide an ESG or risk scorecard example.
Many boards are struggling to introduce Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) metrics into incentive remuneration plans. We discuss key ESG considerations to answer questions such as which ESG metrics should be focused on, how they are measured, and what weighting should be applied to each metric.
LTIs have a poor reputation as overly complex, legalistic, opaque and challenging, with unintuitive performance metrics. But LTI/LTVR can, and should be, the most powerful, effective element of remuneration. So what are the fundamentals of LTI plans and their critical success and failure factors?
Substantial regulatory changes and innovative solutions have recently made compelling LTVR/LTI structures possible for unlisted companies. We analyse the four main approaches we observe in successful unlisted market examples (and the main alternative).
In February, damning WGEA findings laid bare the problematic and oversimplified collection, analysis and reporting of gender pay gap data. This can be remedied for genuine insights and effective action plans to impel true gender equality in remuneration. GRG offers practical support for this long overdue outcome.
SVEs represent an attractive simple element of remuneration for executives that can be introduced for no additional cost. They can also help address deficiencies with STVR and LTVR that are problems for some companies.
KMP remuneration disclosures in remuneration reports are required under the Corporations Act. However in recent years the number of executive roles reported has declined, in an apparent move away from transparent communication to minimalist compliance – perhaps to reduce exposure to criticism. We canvass the change in disclosure, its impact for boards seeking to benchmark remuneration, and explore the path to improved databases.