The NASPP Blog

Our popular “Meet the Speaker” series, featuring interviews with speakers at the 25th Annual NASPP Conference, is a great way to get to know our many distinguished speakers and find out a little more about their sessions in advance of the Conference.

For today’s “Meet the Speaker” interview, we feature an interview with John Schultz of Compensation & Benefit Solutions, who will lead the session “Think of the Administrators! Simplicity vs. Complexity in Incentive Plan Design.”  Here is what John had to say:

NASPP: Why do NASPP Conference attendees need to know about your topic?

John: Well you know what they say about the best laid plans of mice …. Often, in our experience, we see companies come up with great plan design concepts that ultimately result in chaos once it comes down to the nuts and bolts of administering the program.  Some of this can be attributed from not having all stakeholders involved in the plan design, but more often it is simply a matter of unique circumstances in how the mechanics of the various administration inputs operate.  Our goal for this session is to walk through some of the more common plan design features that can create the biggest headaches (and costs!) for the administration team.

NASPP: What is a common mistake companies make and how can they avoid this?

John: Not having all the stakeholders involved when designing the incentive plan.  That doesn’t mean that all parties need to be involved at every step of the way, but we highly recommend to our clients running key design features by the people that will actually be involved in administering them.  For example, payroll often gets the short shrift in plan design (if involved at all), yet that group of stakeholders can flag timing issues that make a design feature much costlier than ever anticipated (think withholding calculations and remittance timing).

NASPP: What is the worst horror story you can tell on your topic?

John: Penalties … lots and lots of penalties ….

NASPP: What is your superpower?

John: Wow, that is a good question. Difficult, though; what does one gauge his response on? Physical prowess? Keen deductive skills? The ability to banter well with super villains? (Brodie Bruce, Mallrats)

Don’t miss John’s session, “Think of the Administrators! Simplicity vs. Complexity in Incentive Plan Design: Session,” at the NASPP Conference!

About the NASPP Conference

The 25th Annual NASPP Conference will be held from October 17-20 in Washington DC. This year’s program features close to 100 sessions on today’s most timely topics in stock and executive compensation; check out the full agenda and register today!