The Employee Voice: Share Plan Votes

The Employee Voice: Share Plan Votes
Webinar

Background: The case for transparency on employee shareholder votes - The idea came from early days of employee share ownership (Eso) when there was much enthusiasm for both employee financial and management participation; companies were listening to the employee voice, respecting the employer-employee relationship.

In the 1980s the aim was to spread the word of employee share ownership. Now employee share plans have become part of the corporate background and the early messages have been lost along the way. Recently there have been questions about whether it is now time to re-think capitalism. Should we then, be thinking differently about Eso? How should we move the purpose of employee share ownership forward?

A forgotten benefit of employee share ownership plans is the vote. The problem is that the Esop vote in the register is a very small percentage, so employee shareholders do not have much say. Could we though listen to the employee vote as a separate category and feed the outcome back to the board to compare with votes over time and with institutional investor votes? This could be a source of participation and information for the company. In time, good practice would expand to public disclosure.

In this webinar Jost Meye and Damian Carnell will open out the topic to public debate.

Speaker: Jost Meye joined Amadeus as HR Director Group Rewards in its Madrid offices in March 2015. Group Rewards manages Amadeus’ various equity programmes (PSP and Share Match Plan), is responsible for the overall annual salary and bonus processes and maintains and oversees its mobility programmes and corporate insurance policies. In addition, the team advises local HR on various compensation and benefits matters such as Sales Incentive Schemes or local company pension, where they seek guidance and counsel, ensuring that corporate HR policy guidelines are being maintained. Since January 2019, Jost and the team have also been the main points of contact for all of Amadeus’ M&A activities for people matter work-streams in the due diligence phase and, where an acquisition is accomplished, also the later integration workstreams.

Jost started his career in HR as a trainee and junior Human Resources Business Partner in 1990 with Citigroup/Citibank in Germany and held various HR roles in the Group including three years as Relationship Manager for the European expatriate population from New York and Dusseldorf, almost 10 years as Comp & Benefits Director for the German Citibank business and time as the Comp & Benefits Head for the Consumer EMEA organisation from London. Managing a variety of equity programmes in the business units under his remit was an integral part of Jost’s day-to-day responsibilities.

Before joining Amadeus Jost was Head of Compensation & Benefits for a German family-owned direct sales organisation of frozen foods and ice cream.

After graduating with a Masters in English and German, Jost spent the first years of his professional life in England, where he taught English at a commercial language school and managed the school’s accommodation and accounting departments.

Speaker: Damian Carnell founded CORPGRO, a consultancy that helps companies with executive compensation aiming for fair, sustainable growth, at the beginning of 2021, having previously been a Director with Willis Towers Watson for 22 years. Damian has over 35 years’ experience advising leading companies on all aspects of executive compensation, but in particular performance pay supporting the business strategy. He was an adviser to the IASB on the share-based payment project IFRS2.

Damian is a UK Chartered Accountant and holds degrees in Commerce from Birmingham University and an MBA from Cass Business School.

Date
Friday, 10 December 2021

Time
10:45 - 11:30 GMT

Cost
N/A