“When you pay a CEO salary, and a cash bonus, that is real cash coming out of the company’s bank account,” said Jan Koors, senior managing director. “When an executive gets a share of stock, it’s like payment in kind.”

“Longer-term incentive plans covering three to four years also are becoming more common across healthcare organizations of all sizes,” said Alexander Yaffe, managing director.

“Aligning executive compensation with a company's performance allows the company to have pay coincide with how well the company's doing," said Wes Hart, managing director.

Especially when it comes to succession-planning discussions, P&C carriers “are thinking about those individuals' compensation programs in a really thoughtful way to make sure those individuals aren't enticed to leave the organization,” said Tim Dupuis, principal.

“You can certainly expect some scrutiny, so you want to make sure that you’re making prudent and defensible decisions about your executive pay determinations,” said Bill Reilly, managing director.

“In the last five to ten years, at almost all of my client companies, we’re constantly talking about pay for performance,” said Tim Dupuis, principal.

“What they want to do is make sure [cybersecurity] is becoming ingrained culturally, and the path to do that is by linking it to [executive] compensation,” said Aalap Shah, managing director.

According to a Pearl Meyer survey, 30 percent of US employers offered job titles as a reward last year. Big businesses particularly seem to like dry promotions: 40 percent of companies with annual revenue between $300 million and $1 billion played the dry promotion game.

“In a competitive labor market, it is critical to obtain reliable and current market data when putting together a compensation and total rewards package for any leadership position—and that is most definitely the case for a Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer (CAIO),” said Rebecca Toman, vice president of the survey business unit.

Relevant data for community banks was not available, but all regional banks surveyed in 2023 by compensation firm Pearl Meyer reported providing some cash compensation to advisors, with 78 percent paying per-meeting fees. The median per-meeting fee was $250, with a range of $125 to $1,000 per meeting.

As companies move forward with AI adoption, many leaders have acknowledged that AI is already changing their organizational structure, according to a Pearl Meyer report. Leaders also said they’re developing a change management strategy and implementing communication plans to keep employees informed.

“While CEO compensation discussions are always a negotiation, when it comes to governance and executive compensation discussions—especially where the CEO has become so tied to the perceived value of the organization—the board is no longer negotiating from a position of equal strength,” explained Jan Koors, senior managing director.