Investors demand greater rigor and simplification in pay structures

"In assessing performance, investors are taking a more customized and less benchmarked approach in looking at companies," said John Wilcox, chairman of Morrow Sodali to Agenda Week, commenting the results of Morrow Sodali's latest Institutional Investor Survey. "Since individual companies are facing different competitive or internal operating challenges, investors are recognizing that they may have very good business reasons for rewarding a particular accomplishment by a senior executive or incentivizing executives to push in a certain performance area.” 

“Not surprisingly, the key thing  for investors is the fact that they want to make sure that the pay practices reward good performance rather than any performance. They want to make sure that the incentive plans have stringent performance measures attached and promote the right behavior,” commented Ali Saribas, director at Morrow Sodali.