"To recognize and/or reward employees when funds are limited, companies may assign higher-ranking titles or designations that are more 'creative' and 'flashier,'" said Rebecca Toman, vice president of the survey business unit at Pearl Meyer.

“Our data indicate that companies are increasingly reliant on job titles as an important component of their [talent] strategy,” said Rebecca Toman, vice president of the survey business unit at Pearl Meyer.

“If the CEO adds a lot of shareholder value through decisions that he or she is making resulting in a high return to shareholders, then boards are going to want to make sure that they are rewarding that individual appropriately to ensure that there's alignment,” said Ed Steinhoff, managing director, Pearl Meyer.

“In 2020 and 2021, [tech] employees were capturing that moment to win large pay increases, but now into ’23, we see the pendulum swinging in significant force back the other way,” said Aalap Shah, managing director, Pearl Meyer.”

"We see the most eye-popping numbers in the significant effort to reward and retain employees through the use of titles where 37% of our respondents are ‘actively applying’ titles to retain key employees, up from 27% in 2018," said Rebecca Toman, vice president of the survey business unit at Pearl Meyer.

“Frontline managers are going to have to become much more facile with their ability to explain why the compensation programs work the way they do,” said Jan Koors, senior managing director.

“There’s no question that salaries for hospital executives have accelerated in recent years, but that has partly been driven by high turnover among hospital executives,” said Alexander Yaffe, managing director, Pearl Meyer.

“Calculating compensation actually paid (CAP) has been the most arduous part of the disclosure in year one and recent [SEC] guidance failed to adequately address this critical component,” noted Deborah Lifshey, managing director for Pearl Meyer.

“Some companies are reluctant to push up [executive] pay during a period where mass layoffs, especially in tech, have become commonplace,” said Aalap Shah, managing director, Pearl Meyer.

“We’re actually going to see a year-on-year decrease in compensation levels in the tech sector as a demonstration to shareholders that companies are actually being more judicious and with an eye [toward] future profitability,” said Aalap Shah, managing director, Pearl Meyer.

“The vast majority of my clients in the tech industry are planning to cut their executives’ pay this year by giving them smaller equity packages,” said Aalap Shah, managing director, Pearl Meyer.

“It will be difficult for many [tech] companies to not reduce the number of shares that the executives are getting," said Aalap Shah, managing director, Pearl Meyer.