One of the twelve principles of Conscious Compensation®, as they stand today (and are continually evolving) is that compensation should be “easy to understand for all stakeholders”: No compensation program should be so complex that stakeholders with a typical level of business knowledge are unable to understand the program. Bankers, suppliers, customers, and employees all receive compensation from their … Read More
Conscious Compensation® Update
As a conscious company, Compensation Venture Group chooses its suppliers with consideration of sustainability and impact factors. Airfare is our single largest expense category and we are fortunate to have a conscious, responsible company headquartered here in Seattle as our provider of air travel. From the company’s website: “Following Thursday’s record fourth quarter and full-year earnings announcement, employees at Alaska … Read More
Burn the ISS Burn Rate Table and Help Fix Income Inequality
“62 People Own As Much As Half of the Global Population” – that’s a catchy headline. Maybe correct, maybe not, but likely conceptually correct. An increasingly small number of people own an increasingly large proportion of the financial wealth in the world. I suspect that any of the compensation survey firms could perform a similar calculation about the collective compensation … Read More
Working at Dick’s is a Family Affair
In memory of Dick Spady, co-founder of Dick’s Drive-In, I am highlighting his company’s history of what many deem to be “new” ideas in employee compensation and benefits. Dick’s was founded in 1954 in the Seattle area and now has six locations. They have a rigid business model – no special orders on burgers, no substitutions, and a little cup of ketchup … Read More
The Theology of Pay
Compensation, as a news topic, has worked its way from the Business section to the Front Page (where there are still pages). For example, the Seattle Times did its annual story on executive pay, in the Business section, but the Sunday front page (full disclosure, I was quoted) carried the headline “As pay raises increase for Northwest CEOs, so does income … Read More
Etsy IPO: B Corp, but are they really any different?
The B Corp world is buzzing about Etsy’s S-1 filing, and the first B Corp IPO. I, as a compensation expert, always wonder if B Corp’s really pay their people any differently and consistently with the values of B Corps and Conscious Capitalism. Here’s Etsy’s necessary disclosure about their B Corp status: We are a Certified B Corporation. The term … Read More
Aetna Pay Raise Rationale Cites Turnover Cost – Finally!
Today”s Wall Street Journal reports that the CEO of Aetna expects a “groundswell” in employee pay increases this year. Aetna announced in January that it would increase employee base pay to a minimum of $16 per hour, leapfrogging the new rates announced by Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, and T.J. Maxx. The discussion about the motives of these companies’ moves to increase compensation … Read More
The Gender Pay Gap Solution
01-April-2015 There has been a proliferation of stories in the media about the so-called “gender pay gap” – a label for the observation that a given sample of male workers receives more annual salary and wages than a given sample of female workers. This has gone beyond the business media and become a pop culture topic. Here’s a recap of … Read More
Mandatory Paid Time Off: Microsoft’s Idea for Your Company’s Benefits Program
Last year, Microsoft’s then-new CEO Satya Nadella made an early misstep when he said that female employees should not ask for a pay increase but should “trust the system” and that would result in “good karma” – for which he apologized a few hours later in an email to all Microsoft employees. Contrast that with today’s announcement that Microsoft will require … Read More
Wal-Mart: Employees up $1 billion, shareholders down $9 billion
Just yesterday I told a client of mine from the retail sector that the big news in retail hourly employee compensation was the continuing executive compensation controversy – soon to be further fueled by the publication of CEO Pay Ratios, which will be most extreme in the retail and hospitality sectors – and the migration of the theme to “income … Read More
