Goldman Sachs' Australian Operations First to Tie Exec Pay to Diversity

Over a month ago, Shell announced that it would freeze its top executives' pay and include sustainable development as a significant part of their performance-based bonuses going forward. Last week, European company Akzo Nobel joined the group. This week, Goldman Sachs joins their ranks by expanding its policy to tie executive bonus pay with diversity, although, it stops short of addressing the entire gamut of sustainability.

Goldman Sachs has had its share of bad PR and evil analogies including the more popular ones of the great vampire squid and the more illustrious one by a Rolling Stones writer of "giant blood-sucking head-footed mollusks," as noted by Vault's Finance Editor Derek Loosvelt. With the worst of the recession behind them, sounds like the I-bank is returning on track to continue addressing and implementing its diversity and leadership initiatives. Starting 2011, the bank will tie its senior managers' pay and bonus structure to their performance in expanding diversity in their units by expanding its diversity scorecard to its Australian operations--a first for an Australian financial services firm. (The bank has been using this scorecard in its U.S. operations for a while.) Senior managers in Australia will now have to complete the scorecard annually, including a section on self-assessment questions regarding their own efforts in promoting diversity, and a separate section on the "company measurement of their performance against statistics."

Get more details at The Australian. Also, check out their 2009 Corporate Diversity Survey, where the bank discusses its affinity groups, diversity committee, the scorecard, summer internships and retention numbers.

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