Resource Library ESG & Human Capital Management

ESG metric prevalence in incentives continues to increase among S&P 500 companies but at a slower rate than prior years, as market focus shifts to refining existing ESG metric types and structures rather than increasing adoption.

Moving forward, we anticipate that ESG metrics will continue to become more prevalent among S&P 500 companies before hitting an eventual plateau.

We conducted a pulse survey covering planned FY22 merit budgets and ongoing employee retention challenges and actions.

Our research in 2021 indicates that 28% of companies included DE&I as a metric in executive incentive design. This report evaluates the level of specificity disclosed around DE&I metrics for a representative sample of those companies.

2020 had a profound impact on corporate governance and responsibility, with the pandemic shining a spotlight on health and safety and the national focus on racial justice drawing sharp attention to diversity and inclusion in corporate America.

Given growing stakeholder focus on Human Capital Management (HCM), we sought to understand how companies would approach the HCM disclosure within proxy statements this year. Our study of a sample of proxies filed in December 2020 and January 2021 offers an early proxy season preview of HCM disclosure practices.

Over the fall of 2020, we collected data on ESG & incentives from the Fortune 200. We excerpted from that data a subset of companies that have included a Diversity and Inclusion metric in their incentive designs.

This final report for 2020 points towards design considerations for companies considering integrating more stakeholder metrics in the future.