COVID-19 has not only accelerated dramatic shifts within the healthcare industry, but it has also become a catalyst for change in workforce strategies. In this special report, McDermott Partner Michael Peregrine offers perspective about key trends and priorities for the human capital committee to consider as it plans for the upcoming year and beyond.
While a recent McKinsey and LeanIn.org women and the workplace study pointed to positive gains for women in corporate leadership roles in 2020, women continue to face substantial burdens in their careers. According to this Forbes article, McDermott Partner Michael Peregrine says such burdens pose a “significant threat to the economic and cultural health of an organization.” These burdens include hierarchical validation, burnout, and significant bias and discrimination for women of color.
“Ideally, boards can use the 2020 progress as evidence that their leadership on gender equity can—and does—make a difference,” Peregrine notes.
What questions should a governing board’s executive compensation committee ask itself?
According to this August 2021 e-book edited by McDermott Partner Michael Peregrine, committee members should regularly ask themselves questions about executive benefit programs, executive compensation programs, performance priorities and leadership development programs.
Most corporate directors are familiar with the term “glass ceiling”—as they should be. Fewer directors are familiar with the term “glass cliff”—but they should be. For their ability to recognize the distinction between the two, and respond to the related challenges, will be critical to a company’s efforts to assure gender equality within its workforce.
In a recent article for Forbes, McDermott partner Michael Peregrine outlines why corporate boards should team with management to ensure gender equality across the internal playing field.
Corporate governing boards have a substantial homework assignment given multiple important developments affecting board composition and oversight of workforce culture. These developments encompass new surveys from prominent governance and consulting sources, notable litigation trends and a new state law. Collectively, they represent an accelerated focus by third parties on how directors are selected and employees are retained.
Writing for Columbia Law School’s Blue Sky Blog, McDermott partner Michael Peregrine reports on key developments in the corporate governance space.
Last year ended as an unprecedented and historic year, with far-reaching effects across diversity, equity and inclusion, employment practices and workplace standards. In a recent article for International Law Office, partners from McDermott’s Employment group highlight what changes are expected in 2021 and how these may affect employers and employees.
Joe Biden’s ascendance to the presidency not only spells doom for many of the Trump administration’s business-friendly employment policies; it also may place established tenets of federal labor law on the chopping block. Biden may bring with him to the White House an ambitious pro-labor platform aimed at giving workers and unions a leg up after four years in which the Trump administration moved the legal needle sharply in employers’ direction.
A recent article in Law360, featuring McDermott partner Ron Holland, outlines four areas that labor and employment lawyers should watch after the Biden transition.
Leadership’s responsibility for assuring gender equality within the workplace just received an important, highly public “push.” In a recent article in Forbes, McDermott partner Michael Peregrine analyzes a crucial study by McKinsey and LeanIn.org, which concluded that women have born an outsized workplace-related burden during the COVID-19 economy.
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