There has been a massive shift in how outside Board Directors have been paid over the past 20 years. This has largely been fueled by changes in corporate governance practices over time. Overall, the shift has been away from paying Directors like executives and towards paying outside experts for their time and contributions during their term of service.

Companies have migrated a significant portion of equity compensation to performance-based long-term incentive (LTI) awards"typically performance shares or stock units (PSUs)"from stock options. Over 80% of companies in the S&P 500 now have such plans; these also now comprise the majority weighting among LTI vehicles. This trend has been driven in, large part, by the desire of Compensation Committees to place at least one-half equity compensation in the form of "performance-based" pay as defined by the proxy advisory firms.

As shareholders of U.S. public companies demand more accountability for performance, Boards are under increased pressure to continue to strengthen the P4P linkage of their incentive compensation plans. In a 2013 survey of Compensation Committee members co-sponsored by the NYSE, Conference Board, and Pay Governance, the top 3 "challenges" that Committees stated they were facing involved incentive pay and performance goal setting.

CEO pay continues to be a widely debated topic in the media, within the government, and in the boardroom among investors and proxy advisors. As the U.S. was in the heart of the financial crisis in 2008 – 2009, CEO total direct compensation (TDC = base salary + actual bonus paid + value of long-term incentives) dropped for two consecutive years. As the U.S. stock market sharply rebounded and the economy started to slowly grow again, CEO pay also rebounded. Large pay increases occurred in 2010, primarily in the form of larger long-term incentive (LTI) grants. Since then, year-over-year increases have been fairly moderate – in the 2% to 6% range for the period 2011-2015.

Relative TSR is a performance metric most often used in LTI performance plans. Its use as a metric has nearly doubled over the past 5 years and is now used by approximately 50% of companies spanning all sizes and industries. While the appeal of this metric for shareholders and directors alike is its alignment with shareholder value creation and the absence of having to establish long-term performance goals, there are other nuances and considerations that can make the administration of these plans much more complex than other types of arrangements.

In order to understand the financial performance measures, target goals, performance ranges, and payouts of an annual incentive plan, we analyzed the proxy-disclosed practices of approximately 100 manufacturing and materials companies. We assessed year-over-year (YOY) trends in particular, including the change in target goals relative to actual results and the spread of threshold to maximum goals.

In the current environment with Say on Pay votes and intense media scrutiny, it can be difficult to stay centered on the foundation of the executive pay program. While it is important to be aware of external views and commentary on "best practices", companies must ensure that their executive pay program is built on a rock-solid foundation. In terms of the building blocks of the pay program, most companies apply a "market median" compensation philosophy, but there are a wider range of practices for the peer group, performance metrics and assessing pay-for-performance alignment.

ISS recently announced important updates to its pay-for-performance tests used for evaluating U.S. companies. In addition to total shareholder return (TSR), ISS will use financial metrics to evaluate company performance relative to the ISS-defined peer group. This is the same peer group that ISS uses for the Relative Degree of Alignment (RDA) and Multiple of Median (MOM) quantitative tests.

Ensuring alignment between pay and performance is challenging enough when a business is performing well. But what about during times of an industry or economic downturn, waning company performance, a shift in strategic business focus, or a period of investment when performance expectations are not as high as in recent years? Today, institutional investors and proxy advisors are hyper-focused on pay-for-performance alignment and, by extension, the rigor of performance goals. Any indication of declining incentive goals year-over-year can bring heightened scrutiny, negative commentary, and can increase the likelihood of an "against" Say-on-Pay (SOP) vote recommendation from proxy advisors. What alternatives exist for a company facing the prospect of performance expected to be lower than the prior year? What should be considered in setting incentive plan goals and what can be expected from shareholder watchdogs who closely examine performance goals and alignment with shareholders?

In the past week, ISS has announced draft updates to their 2017 proxy voting guidelines and updates to their QuickScore (now called QualityScore) governance rating system. This alert provides a summary of the key updates for both ISS corporate governance evaluation processes.