Executive Reward Services

Are you getting the best return for your executive pay?

Learn how we can help your business develop the right executive remuneration strategy and incentive schemes.

By creating the right reward plan for your employees you can deliver sustainable value to your shareholders and incentivise outstanding executive performance. We’re a team of specialist executive reward advisers, who work alongside businesses to do just that.

Our technical accounting, corporate finance and HR experts will work with you to find the best executive rewards solution.

We work closely with a wide range of businesses including private and listed company boards, owners and management and have the expertise to provide tax sign-off on reward arrangements.

We’re a local business, so understand local businesses. But, we’re also part of an extensive national and global network. You’ll be able to tap into and stay connected with PwC’s worldwide network of executive reward advisors.

Our Executive Rewards team helps clients with all aspects of reward design and execution, including the development of remuneration strategy, the provision of data to support salary decision making and the design of incentive schemes.

The challenges we can help you with include:

assisting boards to develop executive remuneration strategy, ensuring appropriate consideration of governance, stakeholders and the regulatory environment
reviewing and designing short term incentive schemes (STIs) for executives which drive company performance and motivate individuals
developing a remuneration policy that is strongly linked to your business objectives and helps you to understand and communicate what you value and want to reward
reviewing and designing long term incentive schemes (LTIs) – including their role in the overall remuneration structure, the most appropriate scheme type, performance hurdles and accounting and tax considerations
understanding your comparator markets and providing robust market remuneration data to underpin salary decision making for base salary, fixed remuneration and elements of total reward (including STI and LTI)
supporting STI and LTI implementation, including drafting plan rules, liaison with legal advisers, participant and stakeholder communications, and tax and accounting advice
benchmarking directors’ fees and providing advice on appropriate peer groups and market alignment.

executive benchmarking
reward strategy and policy design and review
review of current remuneration management practice, structure and systems
review and design of STI schemes, including performance metric advice
customised market surveys (within specific industries and for nominated peer groups)
review and design of LTI schemes, accounting, taxation and valuation advice
STI and LTI implementation support
directors’ fees benchmarking
annual executive reward report (published in July)
remuneration related transaction support

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented time for businesses both locally and globally, with
many having to adopt wide-ranging measures to ensure their financial sustainability.

From early March, when COVID-19 infection rates began to gather momentum in New Zealand and Australia,
those in the worst affected industries began to take early action on executive pay constraints.

Specific responses varied, as did the detail of what was released to the market, however common interventions
included: temporary salary cuts for CEOs and executives, NED fee reductions, pay freezes at all levels of staff
and nil payment of bonus and short term incentive amounts.

More material structural changes to either or both of fixed pay and variable remuneration remain to be seen,
with most fixed pay decreases applying to a specified number of months or till the conclusion of the current
financial year when they were initially adopted.

For more on the anticipated short to medium term impacts on executive reward, as workplaces and businesses
move into a ‘new normal’ – please contact our Executive Reward Services team members for a confidential
discussion or follow the links to our:

Executive summary on ‘Managing reward through challenging times'.

'Checklist tool, for practical actions companies can take now'.

Participating in the annual PwC Executive Reward Report

Participating in our report provides you with an opportunity to join other leading companies (from start-ups to listed corporates) in securing high quality, robust and reliable private sector executive remuneration data.

The report enables participants to understand:

how the executive remuneration market has moved over the past 12 months
how competitively executives are rewarded
market trends including short term incentive and long term incentive schemes and their role in executive pay.

Participants can submit data in person with a member of our team or utilising an Excel template.

The full report is only available for purchase by participating companies. You can submit data at any point in the year to purchase the next survey.

2020 Executive Reward Report: Summary of findings

Take part in our Executive Reward Report