Gouvernance | Page 15

Intéressante tribune dans La presse de mes amies Emmanuelle Létourneau et Rosalie Vendette touchant la RSE et la finance sociale : « L’épinglette d’Horacio Arruda, une source d’inspiration pour les entreprises et les financiers » (La presse, 3 mai 2020).

Extrait :

(…) Cela se matérialise par exemple, de la part des investisseurs, par un bilan carbone des entreprises (facteur E) ou un bilan social (facteur S) ou encore une évaluation de la gouvernance (facteur G) mise en place par l’entreprise, ou encore, de sa capacité de la mettre en place.

L’effort qui est fait pour tenir compte de critères ESG, souvent effectué pour une meilleure gestion des risques auxquels ces investissements peuvent être exposés, démontre qu’il est possible de le bonifier en y ajoutant les ODD, vus comme périphériques et faisant partie du même écosystème. En effet, les ODD nous proposent d’unir nos forces en visant des buts communs.

(…)

Responsabilité sociale des entreprises

Que ce soit à travers la prise en compte des facteurs ESG pour une gestion des risques ou une création de valeur ou que ce soit l’adoption de nouvelles orientations en lien avec un ou plusieurs ODD, il est toujours question de responsabilité sociale des entreprises.

Celle-ci appelle à modifier la façon dont les entreprises sont gouvernées et à donner un sens particulier à leurs actions. Tant les facteurs ESG que les ODD devront être pris en compte dans le processus décisionnel des directions d’entreprise et de leur conseil d’administration, qui agira comme gouvernail.

Dans un monde post-COVID-19, où la responsabilité sociale des entreprises est mise sous les projecteurs, il y a fort à espérer que ces exigences des investisseurs et des créanciers soient plus encore orientées vers le développement durable et ses objectifs.

Alors, entreprises, tenez-vous-le pour dit : votre contribution aux ODD et les impacts positifs et négatifs que vous avez sur eux seront de plus en plus scrutés à l’avenir !

À la prochaine…

M. Christophe Roux-Duffort propose un billet relayé par le CAS de l’Université Laval sur les « Quatre scénarios pour l’après-COVID-19: les administrateurs à la manœuvre ». Attention : CA, vous avez intérêt à connaître votre direction et à la questionner sur son envie et sa capacité de changer.

Extrait :

1. Le scénario de la crise-plafond

Le scénario de la crise-plafond illustre bien celui dans lequel la direction se heurte au plafond de verre de la crise sans en apercevoir les sources de renouvellement, et sans envisager de changer quoi que ce soit à ce qui jusqu’avant la crise fonctionnait très bien. Dans ce scénario, la crise confirme l’ordre des choses et il s’agit d’en sortir en rattrapant rapidement le temps perdu pour revenir au statu quo. Ne mésestimez pas cette possibilité. Plus les changements requis par la crise sont importants, plus l’inertie individuelle risque d’être prégnante. C’est le scénario de l’ignorance.

2. Le scénario de la crise-prétexte

Le scénario de la crise-prétexte correspond à celui dans lequel les membres de la direction perçoivent de réels changements à entreprendre en faveur de la transformation de l’organisation sans incarner eux-mêmes les changements nécessaires à ces transformations. Ils se retrouvent en situation de revendiquer le changement de la part de ceux qui pourraient le faire advenir comme le gouvernement, ou même les administrateurs, sans avoir à s’engager eux-mêmes dans une quelconque remise en question. C’est le scénario de l’hypocrisie.

3. Le scénario de la crise-miroir

À la faveur du confinement et des conditions d’introspection qu’il offre, les dirigeants utilisent ce scénario de crise comme un miroir pour identifier leurs limites et les moyens de les dépasser. Ce faisant, ils font des événements un moteur de remise en question et de transformation personnelle. Dans ce scénario cependant, ce renouveau se cantonne à une démarche individuelle qui ne bénéficie pas au reste de l’organisation, parfois par crainte des bouleversements que cela pourrait occasionner. Le changement reste bloqué en quelque sorte à l’échelle de la personne. C’est le scénario du renoncement.

4. Le scénario de la crise-vérité

Ce scénario est identique à celui de la crise-miroir à la différence près que dans ce cas-ci, les dirigeants incarnent en pratique les changements dont ils sont porteurs au sein même de leurs organisations. Ils personnifient le changement qu’ils aimeraient voir se développer. C’est le scénario de la sagesse.

Même si le quatrième scénario apparaît idéal, chacun d’eux contient ses avantages et ses inconvénients et implique de la part des administrateurs un certain doigté pour les accompagner ingénieusement. D’autant qu’à l’intérieur d’un même comité de direction, les personnes pourraient se répartir dans des cas de figure différents les uns des autres.

À la prochaine…

UCLA School of Law vient de publier un rapport d’une dizainede pages sur la gestion du capital humain et son intégration dans la gouvernance des entreprises : « Corporate Governance : The growing Importance of Human Capital Management » (avril 2020).

Extrait :

1. Over the last several years, investors and proxy advisory firms have increasingly focused their attention on environmental, sustainability and governance (ESG) and human capital management (HCM) issues. While there is no one definition of HCM, the term is widely used to cover a very broad range of workforce matters that are of concern to investors and the public as they focus on building long-term value and reducing business and reputational risks. These concerns have resulted in calls for enhanced company disclosures about their HCM practices and processes.

2. Under Delaware and federal law, directors have no duties that are specifically focused on HCM. However, under Delaware law and that of many other states, directors have duties of care, loyalty and oversight that can under certain circumstances apply to HCM matters and can result in director liability.

3. While federal securities laws and rules contain several corporate disclosure requirements that apply to employees and touch on HCM issues, current laws and rules are not as robust or focused as many investors would like and have proposed. In response to rulemaking and other investor requests, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has proposed amendments to its disclosure rules that would expressly require companies to describe their human capital resources to the extent that they are material to an understanding of a company’s business as a whole.

4. Some public companies have already articulated board responsibilities for oversight of HCM matters; some have renamed and expanded the responsibilities of their compensation committees to reflect their expanded focus; and some have disclosed their HCM polices and efforts in their securities law filings and other publications.

5. Separate and apart from the legal requirements that apply to corporate board duties and corporate disclosure requirements, there are important business, governance and reputational reasons for boards and companies to care about and address HCM matters. 6. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to board oversight of HCM matters, areas for possible board attention are (i) diversity and inclusion, (ii) employee satisfaction and engagement, (iii) succession and talent management, (iv) attrition and retention, and (v) ethics, workforce culture and risk.

À la prochaine…

Bonjour à toutes et à tous, je signale cette intéressante étude : Zetzsche, Dirk Andreas and Anker-Sørensen, Linn and Consiglio, Roberta and Yeboah-Smith, Miko, « The COVID-19-Crisis and Company Law – Towards Virtual Shareholder Meetings », 15 avril 2020, University of Luxembourg Faculty of Law, Economics & Finance, WPS 2020-007.

Extrait :

Regulators and Parliaments around the world have responded to the COVID-19 epidemic by amending company law. This crisis legislation allows us to examine how, and to what effect, the corporate governance framework can be amended in times of crisis. In fact, almost all leading industrialized nations have already enacted crisis legislation in the field of company law. 

In our recent working paper, ‘The COVID-19-Crisis and Company Law – Towards Virtual Shareholder Meetings’,  we have sought to (1) document the respective crisis legislation; (2) assist countries looking for solutions to respond rapidly and efficiently to the crisis; (3) exchange experiences of crisis measures; and (4) spur academic discussion on the extent to which the crisis legislation can function as a blueprint for general corporate governance reform.

Countries considered in full or in part include Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Readers are encouraged to highlight any inaccuracies in our presentation of the respective laws, and to bring further crisis-related legislation not considered in this working draft to the attention of the authors. Moreover, readers are invited to indicate where there is room for improvement therein, and/or to signal the need for policy reform.

Drawing on the analysis of these more than twenty countries, we note five fields in which legislators have been particularly active. First, the extension of filing periods for annual and quarterly reports to reflect the practical difficulties regarding the collection of numbers and the auditing of financial statements. Second, company law requires shareholders to take decisions in meetings—and these meetings were for the most part in-person gatherings. However, since the gathering of individuals in one location is now at odds with the measures being implemented to contain the virus, legislators have generally allowed for virtual-only meetings, online-only proxy voting and voting-by-mail, and granted relief to various formalities aimed at protecting shareholders (including fixed meeting and notice periods). Third, provisions requiring physical attendance of board members, including provisions on signing corporate documents, have been temporarily lifted for board matters. Fourth, parliaments have enacted changes to allow for more flexible and speedy capital measures, including the disbursement of dividends and the recapitalization of firms, having accepted that the crisis impairs a company’s equity. Fifth and finally, some countries have implemented temporary changes to insolvency law to delay companies’ petitioning for insolvency as a result of the liquidity shock prompted by the imposition of overnight lockdowns.

The legislation passed in response to the COVID-19 crisis provides for an interesting case study through which to examine what can be done to modernize the corporate governance framework with a view to furthering digitalization. Given the difficulties or indeed the impossibility of conducting in-person meetings currently, the overall trajectory of company law reforms has been to allow for digitalization of corporate governance, and ensuring the permissibility of virtual shareholder meetings (VSM), in particular. 

In this respect, it is safe to assume that the rules on VSM will have model character. While the details of the modus operandi of VSM will require careful adjustment, to ensure that shareholders will be afforded the same rights and opportunities to participate as they would at an in-person meeting (including Q&A), the experimental phase during the crisis will feed into the policy discussion, with some more successful and some less successful examples providing food for thought. Yet, it is safe to say that the COVID-19 pandemic has unveiled the need for virtual-only shareholder meetings, and that some types of VSM will stay for good long after the current crisis has subsided. 

À la prochaine…

Bel article qui amène à réfléchir : Akshaya Kamalnath, « Shareholder Primacy in the Time of Coronavirus », Oxford Business Law Blog, 7 avril 2020.

Extrait :

It has become fashionable in these troubled times to write about how the coronavirus (or Covid-19) situation shows that the writer’s favourite policies are the best ones. Trite as it may be, I don’t want to miss the opportunity to explain and defend shareholder primacy as a theory / principle followed in corporate law.

Do companies have an ethical obligation to take care of employees during the coronavirus pandemic? If not, why are companies asking employees to work from home and even paying employees when they are not coming in to work? Even companies in the gig economy like Uber are stepping up and offering unexpected support to their drivers whom they have refused to consider as employees. For instance, Uber announced that it would offer 14 days of financial assistance to drivers affected by Covid-19. Similarly, to accommodate the demand from workplaces and educational institutions to switch to working online, tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Zoom have begun offering some of their products’ features for free. Why are they going well beyond what current laws require them to do?

Have they begun to embrace stakeholderism (the idea that companies should service all stakeholders equally) and, if so, can we expect such continued benefits being offered to employees in need even after the pandemic has passed? I’d answer both parts of this question in the negative. In my view, these companies are guided by shareholder primacy (the idea that shareholder interests have primacy over that of other stakeholders).

The first and most obvious reason is that shareholders would want directors of the company they have invested in to step up to the occasion when a crisis as big as a pandemic is staring us in the face. While it is normally assumed that shareholder interests translate into profit-making or wealth maximization, intelligent directors would understand that a crisis calls for a different understanding of what shareholders want. The second possible reason for companies to act in the interests of stakeholders at this time is to enhance their reputation. A company making accommodations during a time of crisis might forego some profits in the short-term but will have reputational gains in the long term. The consideration of reputational incentives is not to suggest that companies acting altruistically should be seen as cynical. On the contrary, it is laudable that the directors of these companies have acted in the interests of the company by taking care of relevant stakeholders when it was most needed. The fact that company reputation was one of the variables in the calculus should be noted positively because that shows that shareholder primacy ensures companies act in the interests of other stakeholders when it is most essential. A third reason is that by offering benefits to employees (or independent contractors as in the case of Uber’s drivers) or customers as in the case of the tech companies, the companies have ensured that the relevant stakeholders (customers and employees / independent contractors) would want to work or continue to work with these companies.

If shareholder primacy leads to beneficial outcomes, why is it so reviled? Shareholder primacy is often confused with a myopic focus on short-term profits. To be sure, the company law of most countries requires directors to act in the best interests of the company and, in determining which interests within the company are to be prioritised, to give primacy to that of shareholders. The default assumption is that most shareholders would want to maximise the wealth that they have invested in the company. However, it is left to directors to consider other relevant interests where they are in the best interests of the company. As I have argued above, it was clearly in the interests of the company to prioritise various stakeholders’ interests and act accordingly, and in this instance they have acted accordingly. Not every situation has such an easy answer and so it is left to directors to choose the course of action best suited to the company, with the interests of shareholders being ultimately prioritised.

What happens after the pandemic has passed? While the coronavirus situation is a big crisis and companies have been stepping up, decisions prioritising the interests of one stakeholder over those of others are routine, even in calmer situations, or where a company alone is facing a crisis of some sort. Take for example, employees’ complaints about toxic work culture and harassment, which we now know was the case with Uber in the past. Often the response is to keep the issue under wraps or refuse to address the particular stakeholder’s needs. This unsavoury behaviour cannot however be attributed to either shareholder primacy or stakeholderism. We would expect that shareholders would want companies to clean their house as soon as they know there is trouble so that they are not at the receiving end of the law suit at a later date and, more importantly, because shareholders would want talented employees to be retained within the company. Unfortunately, the unsavoury behaviour is simply an expression of human nature in some cases and better incentives to prevent such behaviour need to be devised. Similarly, for concerns of other stakeholders, the environment for instance, environment protection and climate change laws would constrain directors’ actions rather than relying on principles of either shareholder primacy or stakeholderism to do the job.

All this is to say that there are problems with how companies are run and we need innovative solutions to create better incentives rather than falling back on paying lip service to stakeholderism as the Business Roundtable recently did in its 2019 statement.

À la prochaine…

Merci au cabinet Stikeman Elliott pour ce billet daté du 24 avril 2020 intitulé « COVID et gouvernance d’entreprise : une mission plus large pour les conseils d’administration ». Un précieux éclairage sur ce qui va changer pour les CA avec la COVID-19…

Extrait :

Cette discussion aborde les principaux défis auxquels sont confrontés les chefs d’entreprise canadiens à l’approche de la phase de réouverture :

se concentrer sur les véritables enjeux; 

veiller à la gestion immédiate des crises et à la préparation du conseil d’administration; 

repenser la stratégie et la gestion des risques;

repenser les cadres incitatifs; et

repenser l’objectif de l’entreprise.

Comme en conclut l’article, cette crise redéfinira une grande partie de ce que nous considérons comme étant de la « bonne gouvernance ». Les conseils d’administration, en particulier, doivent élargir leurs missions pour s’assurer que leurs entreprises sont préparées à la nouvelle réalité qui les attend.

À la prochaine…