Executive compensation—in particular, pay for performance—continues to top the list of governance concerns among institutional investors. Companies in more than a dozen countries globally now offer shareholders a “say on pay,” which is having a dramatic effect on the design and disclosure of compensation plans. Katherine (“KT”) Rabin, CEO of Glass, Lewis & Co., one of the world’s leading providers of governance and proxy voting services to the world’s largest investors, will provide an insider’s view on how investors evaluate compensation issues, including examples of best and bad practices, lessons learned from the 2013 proxy season and what to expect next year.

With a growing economy and the start-up engine in full gear, we are entering an age of the private market. In an interview style presentation, Carine Schneider of Accretive Solutions and Greg Brogger, formerly CEO and Founder of SharesPost and now President of NASDAQ Private Market will discuss how the private market works, the impact on the labor market and the challenges and unintended consequences presented to both public and private companies as they design their employee stock plans in this new era where mature private companies are no longer the exception to the rule!

Today’s complex and innovative executive compensation plans come with a cost; hard to understand incentive properties and confusing value of the total pay package. In this keynote presentation, Dr. Bettis will illustrate how science can be used to quantify incentive alignment and determine the real value of plans with multiple performance targets in short-term and long-term pay.

Join Carine Schneider, GEO's Chairman of Board and CEO of EASi, and Facebook’s Manager of Equity Programs, Sara Spengler, for this one of a kind interview set to delve into a “day in the life” of equity compensation administration at Facebook. Attendees will be treated to Sara’s unique perspective as she recounts the challenges she and her team faced as they prepared to tackle the long list of tasks necessary to prepare for and ultimately survive employee stock administration after the Facebook IPO. While stock administration’s role in Facebook's IPO is just plain interesting, the lessons learned from this event can easily apply to virtually every stock plan administrator, especially those facing an IPO event in the future. Come and hear what it was like to be part of the Facebook team, preparing to manage a broad-based, global equity program with a unique structure, after a historic IPO.
Levels I, II and III.  Field of Study: Personnel/HR.

Imagine the power of education and communication if stock compensation pages got as many views as flash mobs or dancing cats on YouTube. Our plans and technology have evolved, but too often our communication has stagnated with printed materials and static intranet sites. Validated by the wild success of viral videos and YouTube, videos are all the rage. You don’t need an all-star cast and legendary Hollywood director to make this medium an Oscar worthy contender in your stock compensation toolkit. Join this panel of two recent GEO Award Winners for Best Use of Video Communications and their providers to explore how video and other digital mediums can help connect and educate today’s stock plan participants. This panel will provide a comprehensive overview of your digital choices, including video, computer-based training, voice enriched video presentations, and others. Whether it is a production of your own, a partnership with your service provider, or an arrangement with a third party, having a solid understanding of what works, and what doesn’t, in the digital world, will help to ensure your success. From concept, to budget, to storyboards, to production, join this panel to explore how to best use digital mediums to educate and communicate stock programs.

How confident are you that your global employees fully understand the complexities of their equity compensation? Have you sent communications to them and sensed they were being ignored? Are you concerned that your equity plans are not meeting their objectives in certain locations? The challenges of communicating and educating your global employee population are more complex and require more effort than your US population. This team will take you beyond the more common language, time zone and cultural differences and discuss some of those unexpected “gotchas” that only true international communication experience can provide and show you how these issues don’t have to be a hindrance to getting your message across effectively. This session will provide you with an overview of the challenges and best practices to follow when preparing for a successful global communication and education campaign.

Get an inside look at a few of this year’s GEO Award winners and hear directly from them and the providers and advisors who assisted them with their award-winning programs and solutions. Hear how their accomplishments in Award categories such as best plan communications, best use of technology, etc., are game changing and learn how you can implement some of their dynamic achievements to ultimately create your own award-winning program at your company!

In a world where change is considered the only constant, continual change in an organization is a prerequisite for success. However, organizational change efforts do not always achieve the desired results due to the lack of understanding and acceptance even when the change should be viewed as positive. This was a particular concern for Cargill, where over the past year, they introduced significant changes to their equity program, including modifications to vesting schedules, the addition of post-employment provisions and retention rules, etc., which were met with skepticism by employees. Go behind the scenes with Cargill and hear how they developed an effective communications program to introduce these changes to employees and teams. Find out what tools they developed to manage their communications initiative, including the unique videos they used, and hear what types of lessons they learned during the process.

Whether your long-term incentive plans range from the more traditional options, shares, and stock purchase plans to cutting edge performance awards, effectively communicating these plans to employees is crucial. Do your employees understand what their equity awards are and how they can personally maximize the financial benefits? Challenges for employees include complex plan designs, new plan designs, or multiple plans to track and understand. Does your education program provide employees with the tools they need to understand the value their plans deliver? Our panel of communication all-stars has extensive experience in communicating a wide variety of plan types. Learn from their experiences on how to recruit, retain, and motivate employees through your communications while also driving company performance.

Understanding the attitudes and behaviors of your stock plan participants can make all the difference when designing a stock program. Attend this incredibly useful session where Morgan Stanley will share the answers to critical questions like these: How familiar are participants with their stock plans? How much do they appreciate and value their stock plan benefits? Who do participants look to for education in their plan? To what degree are stock plans incorporated into participants' financial planning? Having the right information—like answers to these questions—at the right time can make all the difference!

There’s no question that analytics are a valuable commodity to any business. They contribute to making fact-based decisions about many things, including the quality design of a stock program. In this session, get an in-depth look at how data analytics, such as statistical information about grants—issuances, mobility, exercises and expirations—by participant level, geography, industry, award types and other drivers can all be used to design effective stock-based compensation plans and ultimately help companies design plans that fulfill the needs of their participants while keeping expenses at a minimum and implementation easy. Attend this session and learn why competitive stock plans prevail where companies utilize data analytics in shaping their stock plan design.

While Relative TSR plans are not new, they are still not widely used programs for delivering long- term incentive compensation. Their valuation complexities often make them a challenge to understand, even for seasoned professionals, and difficult to communicate to decision makers and program participants. This session will provide an issuer’s perspective from the initial stages of considering such a plan, to educating stakeholders and decision makers about relative TSR awards, to implementation and communication of these awards. Helpful tips and lessons learned will be shared to help other professionals navigating through such an implementation.

Say-on-Pay forces in today’s environment have prompted many companies to shift towards “best practices” as a way to mitigate the risks of shareholder scrutiny. This exciting session will showcase tools for evaluating pay and performance relationships, discuss how to balance external standards of good governance and investor expectations with sound business strategy and highlight specific plan pitfalls to avoid. The discussion will also focus on the current debate regarding realized and realizable pay, particularly as it relates to equity compensation prior to vest and exercise and discuss alternative definitions and ways to enhance CD&A disclosure regarding the alignment between pay and performance. Using Jabil Circuit, an $18 billion electronics manufacturer, as a case study, the panel will show you how to ensure your equity programs align pay for performance and how this alignment can be communicated to shareholders in ways which enhance the likelihood of a favorable Say-on-Pay vote.

This panel will provide the latest—just released, never-before-seen, market data on performance award usage by geography and industry, assess performance award usage at high versus low performing companies and reveal results of a multi-year analysis of performance awards, tracking payouts against standard shareholder measures of corporate performance. Join this panel as they unveil the second year analysis to reveal where performance awards pay out in alignment with corporate performance… and where they don’t. See the association of long versus short performance periods on payout and the impact of relative versus absolute measures. This panel will also address whether companies are cherry-picking performance metrics and if payouts reflect a softening of the business conditions. Round it out with a case study from The Travelers Companies on their use of performance awards. The results of this innovative research may surprise you and make you look at your performance awards in a whole new light.

In this session, get a holistic view of the various types of stock purchase plan offerings around the world with a focus on two types of non-qualified ESPPs in use today. Learn what the full implications are—good and bad—now and long into the future, for the company and its employees related to each type of stock purchase plan offering. The more you know here the more likely you are to design a plan that is well suited for all parties and the better your employee perception and participation will be!

Global compensation and rewards are a living, breathing part of any multi-national company. Many businesses that have moved into the global marketplace often spend a considerable amount of time and capital setting up a regional footprint. Finding the right talent to run these operations is a critical concern and companies are often willing to pay a premium for the right fit. As the local presence takes root it is important to bring these regions into alignment with the rest of the organization’s pay for performance strategy. We will cover how to do this effectively while clarifying the major factors of concern that are critical to both cash and equity compensation when rolling out a global pay for performance strategy.

It’s not uncommon for companies to localize salary and benefits. The problem is that pay, including equity compensation, is often adjusted for the same position in different locations within the same country. This level of customization can be even more significant between countries. With ‘no one size fits all’ fix here, companies must find ways to ensure their grant practices are relevant to widely varying local markets. Learn what companies are doing to determine appropriate grant sizes between different locations, e.g., engaging outside assistance, following the competition, etc., and their rationale for it. Whether your company is just beginning to expand by granting equity beyond the borders of the US or has been doing so for quite some time, this session will offer answers to the questions you have around global grant best practices and what you should be doing regularly to adapt your grant practices to ongoing economic, cultural and organizational changes.

We asked over 900 companies with headquarters all over the world one “simple” question: What are the most pressing initiatives concerning your global equity plan? The results overwhelmingly put the need to determine what type of plans to operate and in which country at the top of the list. Join this exciting session for a dive into the Deloitte global survey data and global experience, focusing on how companies are dealing with the need to align their incentive programs with their business objectives and talent strategies with country-specific challenges. Come join the discussion focused on the issues to consider when weighing design decisions, suggested approaches on how to identify the factors impacting your design decisions, key talent considerations, core tax and regulatory considerations and more.

Risk exists in virtually every aspect of our lives, and failure is often perceived as something that happens to the “other guy.” For businesses, this thinking can be dangerous. Panelists in this session will openly explore the possibility and consequences of failure as it relates to equity compensation valuation and highlight the unique opportunities you have to help make significant improvements here. Fight complacency—acknowledge, understand, and address the relevant risks in these highly critical areas, such as the improper use of the SEC Simplified Method, incorrect use of the Black-Scholes model to value warrants and more. The issues raised in this session are guaranteed to serve as a starting point for a crucial dialog around audit risk in valuation and help answer important questions every CFO should be prepared to address.

There are many issues that can occur in accounting and reporting for share-based compensation—from disjointed downstream processes with insufficient data reconciliation to errors in the estimation of forfeiture rates and so on. Fortunately, most of these problems are common ones—and there are few people better equipped to deal with them than the team of accounting experts on this panel. Join them as they uncover some of the most common accounting and reporting errors in equity compensation and offer smart solutions you can easily implement for your plans.

Often times, vesting schedules are thought of as synonymous with expense schedules, but experience is littered with examples where expense is recognized as distinct from vesting. Go beyond these fundamental concepts of expensing and explore the underlying theory of how expense is allocated over time and applied algorithmically. Attend this session and examine various methods to help achieve compliance with ASC 718 and learn how advanced mathematics can play a role in computing stock compensation expense.

Equity Managers are constantly asked to lead projects which have far reaching implications and require planning and detailed strategy to execute. This session will discuss ways and provide tools to plan for, manage and learn from your projects. In addition to gaining this knowledge, the session will look at a couple of real life projects which demonstrate how to use project management tactics to manage stake holders’ expectations, deal with unforeseen complications and measure project success.

In the spring of 2013, UBS hypothesized that all equity plan participants need better education, personal advice and easy access to both. UBS approached several clients with an offer to conduct research into the needs, behaviors and methods of learning among their participants.

AbbVie believes educating its participants is a key element of the equity compensation process. Although perceived as beneficial, there are some challenges that come with offering education, including the ability to measure the results or effectiveness of the programs. Do participants fully understand and value their awards? In this session, the panel will share how the research is impacting both companies’ view on advice and education for both the plan sponsor and their employees at all levels. They will share their approach to understanding the broad spectrum of needs and how they are partnering in broadening the participant experience to achieve greater success. Come hear their findings and how you can apply them to your program.

Under unprecedented scrutiny from shareholders and activist groups in light of Say-on-Pay, compensation committees are hungry for information six or more months before a grant is scheduled to occur. The lengthened timeline and increased need for information early in the grant process creates unique stresses for all parties involved. Moreover, available information and relevant circumstances change over the timeline leading up to an actual grant, and initial design considerations, HR perspectives, and estimates of financial reporting variables can differ substantially from the final calculations when an actual grant is made. Join this panel of experts as they reveal the types of key information you need to provide your comp committee early in the grant process so that downstream headaches can be avoided at grant date and hear ways to align your needs with your compensation committees to support your companies grant objectives.

Corporate spin-offs have become an increasingly popular way for companies to release shareholder value and achieve other business objectives. In fact, the New York Times, citing Dealogic, reported that there were 93 spin-off transactions worth $128 billion in 2011, and that 2012 kept pace with 85 spin-off transactions worth $109 billion. Spin-offs, however, are complicated transactions often met with trepidation and uncertainty—particularly as they impact global compensation practices. Come hear about the challenges and opportunities of this unique type of corporate transaction from two companies, Covidien and TripAdvisor, who recently went through a spin-off and also hear from some of the providers who assisted them in the process.

Every company needs to know that their investments—including their equity programs—are paying off. While the ROI of an equity program may not be as easy to assess compared to other investments, it should be measured. Discover how to go about determining whether your company’s equity programs are “paying off” in this interactive session where panelists will navigate the various steps and approaches you can take to go about doing an ROI for your own equity program. Panelists will also share data on how many companies are calculating their equity program ROI and how they are going about doing so. Attend this session and learn what you can do to ensure that the value of your equity programs is never in question!

Improving the RFP: Better Questions Yield Better Results
Because the RFP is the start of a potentially long-term relationship with a service provider, it’s important that no stone is left unturned in the process. Asking the right questions in the RFP ensures a better outcome and helps guarantee you get a best-in-class partner. But what are the right questions to ask? This hands-on session details 30 important and different questions you can use to develop a successful RFP. Spend just 30 minutes at this workshop and avoid a half-baked RFP that could ultimately cost your company significant dollars in time and resources.

Hear from a distinguished panel of issuers about the risks, benefits and costs of choosing to export home country equity compensation practices versus adopting local practices and approaches. Panelists representing Amazon, Citrix Systems and Royal Ahold will address the issues and decisions that multi-national corporations must face when considering to grant equity to their global employees. Hear their perspectives on the effects that company culture and compensation philosophy can have on global equity, as well as how current practices and business considerations can factor into equity compensation decisions for recruitment and retention in various industries, markets and locations.

Managing restricted stock unit (RSU) releases for mobile employees continues to be a challenge. The reality is that there isn’t an easy solution. This session will explore the complexity behind offering RSUs to mobile employees and offer best practices for preparing for and executing an RSU release for your mobile employees. Attendees will learn about common tax and accounting issues to consider for administration and employee communications, and get the practical ideas, tools, resources (and empathy) they need from powerhouse companies to help master RSU releases for mobile employees once and for all!

Engage in a discussion around the top issues in executive and equity compensation that few people are talking about and learn what they might mean to you. Topics will include: equity compensation in LLCs, how to identify the right metrics for performance-based pay, things to consider before going public, 162(m)-based derivative suits, the impact of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) ruling on public companies and many more.

Now more than ever external influences play an increasing role in the design of incentive compensation programs. This all-star panel will discuss how incentive compensation has evolved—considering the impact of external factors such as Say-on-Pay and shareholder advisories like ISS and Glass Lewis. Internal considerations, such as reputational risks to directors and the tension external forces have on management and on employees in general, will also be discussed. Attend this session and find out current trends in performance based long-term incentives and the relative pros and cons of optics (both internally and externally), accounting and tax implications.

"One size fits all" clothing is just about as practical as a global grant agreement intended to fit your entire employee population. For today’s environment, grant agreements should be labeled "One size fits most… if most of the employees are US employees and never move." However, with proper design, you can sew up a grant agreement that really does fit all. A truly global agreement is stitched up to flatter not only US employees, but also non-US employees, as well as mobile employees. A truly global form of agreement is accessorized with country-specific appendices and includes designer touches that cover data privacy, tax withholding obligations, entitlement issues and more. Join this panel of experts to learn more about the risks of a poorly fitting agreement, how to justify a grant agreement make-over and how to design a perfectly suited agreement.

This interactive session, led by the Head of Morgan Stanley’s Executive Financial Services group, will focus on the many new developments surrounding Rule 10b5-1 trading plans. Recent press, current issues and trends, and best practices for drafting and implementing compliant, administratively manageable and successful plans for 10b5-1 plans will be covered. Attendees will learn the significant implications of the latest developments in this area and how they apply to their own programs and will leave this session with strategies for enhancing compliance in this area.

Earlier this year—in a deal valued at close to $1 billion—San Diego-based company, Websense, agreed to be sold to a private equity firm. The transaction was recently completed, and reinforces what appears to be a trend among many technology companies like Blue Coat Systems, BMC Software, and SonicWall to return to private management. Join this session and hear “the Websense story.” The panelists will share how both employees and shareholders responded to the deal and discuss specifically the ramifications to existing stock programs. Find out what they will do differently as a private company with regard to their equity and executive compensation programs and what other changes they expect as a result of this new found freedom from the public markets. Bring your questions to this presentation and be prepared to take notes.

If you are wondering where you should be focusing your attention and tracking for possible future developments, our “World Watch” team will be onsite to get you the information you need to know now! This year’s global update panel will cover the latest legal and regulatory developments focusing on areas like China, France, Russia, South Africa, Australia and other countries which have made changes that will affect your global plans. This session will also cover practical considerations to make sure you keep up-to-date cost effectively and stay ahead without breaking the bank.

This fast-paced session addresses the most recent and significant legislative changes impacting global stock plans. Participants will learn key tax and legal changes happening around the world and walk away with a clear action plan of issues to consider and steps to take to address these recent changes. Panelists will also focus on approaches and considerations for minimizing risk to companies and their employees in this area, as well as discuss what changes in regulations, case law and audit and enforcement activity may warrant immediate attention or require changes to current corporate practices.

A Pay-for-Performance Case Study
It isn’t new news that the CD&A in the proxy statement has taken on a much greater importance now that shareholders can vote on executive compensation programs. However, what is still evolving is how to effectively write your CD&A to clearly explain how your compensation program works, how it supports the company’s strategic objectives, and why shareholders should vote in favor of it. Participate in this session and hear a quick case study from Ed Hauder of Exequity on the right way to convey the pay-for-performance relationship in your proxy statement. Find out--in no time at all--what works and what doesn’t.

Everybody knows that there are tax and regulatory issues with offering employee stock plans to employees outside of the U.S. such as tedious exchange control approvals, expensive securities prospectus filings and administratively painful tax "qualified" plans that companies must tackle to offer these plans globally. Each company's approach should be different and tailored to the company's risk tolerance, desire to get equity into employee's hands, availability of alternative awards (cash-settled), specific employee population, company culture, etc. These decisions also come with a laundry list of considerations such as:

• Does it really make sense to spend $50,000 setting up a tax qualified plan for which employees will only have an anticipated tax savings of $500 each?
• Should you file a securities prospectus to offer an ESPP with a 5% discount if the prospectus will cost $80,000 to prepare?
• What about not complying with requirements that are less than clear and the risk is extremely low?
• Where are companies on the compliance radar?
• Are you revisiting tax qualified plans frequently enough to ensure that they are really providing benefits that outweigh the costs?

This session will help you understand the international compliance world—what are the choices, the risks and benefits—and how to make practical and informed choices regarding where to spend compliance dollars when offering employee stock plans globally. Western Union will also share its practical approach to dealing with some of these issues.

Spotlight on Latin America
Hear Sean Trotman of Deloitte discuss the latest regulatory and legislative developments in Latin America. Special focus will be given to Brazil where the federal court recently concluded that two Brazilian companies were required to pay social security taxes on stock option income, which has raised questions about future judicial decisions. Find out what the changes in this part of the world mean to you in this quick but intense update on this very important region!

Spotlight on the UK
Be the first to hear the latest developments happening in the UK along with how to respond to them from an industry leader based in the UK. Janet Cooper of Tapestry will share everything you need to know about the latest happenings in the UK in just 30 minutes. This session is a must for any company that offers equity in the UK.

In this session, two experts in the field of equity plan authorizations will explore the issues a pre-IPO company should consider in deciding when to establish its equity plan. They will discuss how those plans subsequently evolve in an ongoing public company. And, in a dialogue with each other and in give-and-take with session participants, they will offer contrasting perspectives on equity programs created pre-IPO versus post-IPO, and debate the key differences between them, including: how to size the share authorization, regulatory and shareholder considerations, and specific equity plan design elements, such as ‘net share counting’ and 162(m) requirements.

Taxes may be a certainty but they certainly aren’t simple. This fast-paced session will touch on several advanced tax issues, including FICA taxes and equity, expatriate tax administrative considerations, and equity awards tax deduction issues and transactions, as well as highlight some legislative and regulatory equity tax developments, including some potential changes to 162(m). This session is sure to provide practical guidance to all.

It's hard to find a hotter topic today in equity compensation than mobility. Global and state mobility both present serious challenges; however, this session will focus on what may be the greater of two evils— state mobility. As more and more states implement state taxes that need to be assessed, companies are putting more weight on the need for compliance in this area. Our experienced panelists will address the biggest struggles companies face around state mobility compliance and how to deal with these issues. Attend this session for a closer look into the issues you need to address here, and ways to tackle your toughest challenges.

Get an overview of the tax, legal and practice administration challenges faced by multi-national companies associated with the global movement of funds that result when participation in equity-based awards are extended to an international workforce in this important session. Specifically, panelists will discuss relevant provisions and practices by companies, their brokers and share plan administrators related to the international transfer of proceeds from equity transactions, the settlement of inter-company recharges from the US to its foreign subsidiaries, complications imposed by countries that impose foreign currency exchange controls, issues related to exchange rate fluctuations, and satisfying remittances of tax withholdings in multiple jurisdictions. Come to this session and learn the concepts underlying sound practices here and leave being able to evaluate the quality of your company’s processes.

What used to be a world of relatively straightforward equity arrangements—RSUs and Stock Options, with time-based vesting, has morphed—slowly but surely—into more complex instruments to satisfy shareholders and regulators. Deferrals have become mandatory; vesting is trending toward the use of performance metrics in addition to continuous employment; clawbacks are tightened; cash linked to equity, or in lieu of equity, is more common; punitive tax rates, sale restrictions and bonus caps are often in the news in Europe. These, and other trends, have had a knock-on effect for enterprise tax planners, who must consider not only the after-tax impact on their local and cross-border executives, but also the need to ensure that the corporate tax deductibility of these newer program expenses is not compromised as to amount or timing. Come to this highly relevant session and learn how to turn these challenges into opportunities.

Katie Klingensmith, an economic and policy analyst at UBS, was the featured keynote earlier this year at GEO’s Northern California Forum. Back by popular demand, Katie will update attendees on the current US and global economic conditions; the US weaning itself from fiscal and monetary stimulus, including the latest on the debt ceiling, sequester, and Fed taper; as well as the long-term expectation for global economic activity, equity returns and interest rates.