"I should first say how valuable and decisive your advice has been over the last year, in modernising the pay structure for IOP and IOPP. Certainly I would have found my task as Chair of the Remuneration Committee very difficult without your input. I think it almost certain that we shall want to call on your advice on frequent occasions in the future."
Professor Julian D C Jones, OBE FRSE FOSA FInstP, Vice Principal Heriot-Watt University
THEIR CHALLENGE
The Institute of Physics (IOP) is a leading not-for-profit scientific society promoting physics, with a wholly-owned commercial publishing arm. It is therefore no surprise that there is great diversity of roles across the top team ranging from Institute directors managing academic and membership functions, commercial publishing directors, and ‘group’ roles such as Finance, IT and HR. Add to this the different base locations and the mix is complex.
The Remuneration Committee commissioned Innecto to conduct an independent review of reward. The aim was to ensure salary and bonus levels for the CEO and nine executive directors were market-competitive, and to review the current bonus arrangements for the group and publishing directors to ensure a strong alignment with performance.
OUR SOLUTION
Understanding complex and unique organisations is one of our strengths at Innecto, and enabled us to source the appropriate market benchmarks from similar not-for-profit organisations, academia, the publishing sector, and from organisations across the commercial sector. Having a good understanding of what is available, and existing relationships with survey providers, helps us to quickly source the required data. We then combined this data, using weighting where necessary to increase reliability, and prepared a report for the Remuneration Committee along with our associated recommendations.
The Outcome
Innecto took an inclusive approach in the review of the bonus arrangements and conducted structured interviews with the CEO, a non-Executive director from the Remuneration Committee, and all participants in the scheme creating real engagement and understanding of the process. Not only was this group a good source of feedback on the current scheme, but also a rich source of ideas and cross-industry experiences.
Innecto then combined this internal data with our own knowledge and experience of what works well, and what is seen to be good practice externally, resulting in a series of recommended changes that we presented to the Remuneration Committee for implementation going forward.
