Amgen is trying a new tool to blunt some of the shareholder outrage over executive compensation: a survey.

Tucked away on page 51 of the pharmaceutical giant’s proxy statement is mention of a page on Amgen’s website where shareholders can fill out a 10-question survey asking what they think of the company’s compensation policies. We at Compliance Week haven’t seen something like that before, and we doubt it will placate shareholders all that much—but it’s a gesture, and a much more conciliatory one than the gesture shareholders are giving corporations these days.

The survey itself comes from TIAA-CREF’s criteria to evaluate the Compensation Discussion & Analysis discussions in corporate proxy statements. We couldn’t find any direct link to the survey page from anywhere else on Amgen’s website, and corporate spokesmen couldn’t immediately tell us how many people have submitted their opinions since the site went live sometime late last month. (Amgen filed its proxy statement on March 26.) So clearly this is what the folks in marketing call a “soft-launch” product.

We do have a few concerns: Amgen could do a better job alerting shareholders to the survey’s existence (it only gets a two-sentence plug at the end of the CD&A’s executive summary). Security is loose; we identified ourselves as one Gregory House, M.D., to get past the registration page and see the survey questions. And of course, if Amgen were truly determined to gauge shareholder views on compensation, it could send out that survey in a paper mailing of some kind.

Still, the concept gets a thumbs-up from us. Amgen wasn’t required to offer a survey like this at all. It provides relevant information from the proxy statement for each survey question, so people can see the company’s argument for approving its pay policies. For example, Question 4 asks: “Are the incentives clearly designed to meet the company's specific business challenges, both short and long-term?” Right after that is a URL link to a two-paragraph response from Amgen, with more links to the specific pages in the proxy statement that address the point. Clearly, somebody at Amgen put thought into collecting this feedback.

The grand question still is how Amgen will now use the feedback it gets; if this survey is just a showpiece to help achieve a smooth annual meeting (Amgen’s price is hovering just above 52-week lows), that’s sad. But there are easier ways to make empty gestures, so we suspect this one is legitimate. And it’s certainly an idea other companies should mimic.

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