Hello, Memo readers!
Stress is bad. Novo Nordisk’s CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen knows it. He wants to slash the number of the company’s 64,000-plus workforce that are feeling stressed — but isn’t shooting for absolute zero.
“I don’t think you could run a company if more than 10% of your employees are suffering from stress,” Jørgensen said last week at the company’s annual general meeting.
Jørgensen has reason to not completely take his foot off the gas. He’s been at the head of the company that produces the popular diabetes and weight loss medications Ozempic and Wegovy, since 2017. Under his leadership, Novo Nordisk has become the 12th largest company in the world by market cap. Skyrocketing sales of its medications have even helped boost Denmark’s GDP.
All of that growth though is, well, stressful! Jørgensen believes current stress levels — 14% of employees reported feeling this way — are unsustainable. Here’s how Novo Nordisk plans to bring that percentage down to that 10%.
C-suite pay is higher than companies’ tax bills? You bet
Stressed or not (we’re guessing very stressed), C-suite executives are being flooded with cash. Meanwhile, the companies they work for are playing hooky with their tax duties — well, at least paying far below what most do.
The average compensation package for executives at 35 profitable companies in a recent study averaged to about $9.5 billion from 2018 to 2022. Their collective tax bill? Negative. Instead of paying taxes, the companies, on average, received a $1.8 billion refund. Here’s some notable examples:
T-Mobile
C-Suite pay: $675 million
Income tax: -$80 million
Tesla
C-Suite pay: $2.5 billion
Income tax: -$1 million
Netflix
C-Suite pay: $652 million
Income tax: $236 million
Seven other companies were among those that spent more on their top five C-suite executives than they did in taxes during the five year period. See how they stacked up.
More from Quartz
💆🏾A manager’s guide to combating burnout
🏋️ 5 key behaviors to make yourself resilient to stress
📝 Understand these 4 work styles to reduce stress
🧠 How managers can encourage mental health days
🤔 Can the dreaded compliance meeting save our workforce from a mental-health crisis?
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Send questions, comments, and stressful sweet treat decisions to [email protected]. This edition of The Memo was written by Bruce Gil, Francisco Velasquez, and Morgan Haefner.