A month before Procter & Gamble told the world who its next chief executive would be, that person announced the restructuring. In June 2025 P&G said it would cut 7,000 office jobs over two years. The promotion was made public in July.
This matters because it removes the usual excuse. Shailesh Jejurikar did not inherit the plan. He wrote it as chief operating officer, then took the top job on 1 January 2026 and became chairman of the board on 1 August. There is no predecessor to attribute the hard part to.
The two numbers in the proxy
In the fiscal year ended 30 June, Jejurikar was paid $17.9 million, a 94.5% increase on the $9.2 million he received the previous year as chief operating officer. In the same year the median P&G employee was paid $68,600, down 13.7% from about $79,500. That moves the company’s chief executive pay ratio to 278 to 1, from 276 to 1.
The restructuring is running. On 4 August P&G disclosed it had cut 5,000 workers and employed 104,000, down 4.6% from 109,000 a year earlier.
A doubled pay packet in the year the median wage falls and 5,000 jobs go is the sentence that writes itself, and it is not very interesting. Chief executive pay rises on promotion because that is what the job pays, and a median wage moves when the shape of the workforce changes. The ratio went from 276 to 278. It is barely news.
The number that should worry him
On 29 July P&G reported annual profit of $16 billion on sales of $87 billion. Organic sales growth, the measure the company and its investors actually watch, came in at 1%, down from 2% the year before.
That is the number Jejurikar is paid to move, and it went the wrong way in the year he took charge. The stated purpose of cutting 7,000 office roles was to fund investment in new products and pull the company out of a sales slump. A year in, the cost side has moved and the growth side has not.
This is the genuine difficulty of the job rather than a verdict on the man holding it. Restructurings are visible immediately and their benefits are not. Anyone running a company of this size can reasonably ask for more than eight months. But he has an unusually clean scoreboard, because he authored the plan, he owns the year, and the metric is one P&G publishes every quarter without being asked.
The scoreboard he gave himself
Organic sales growth has to turn back up while the headcount reduction continues toward 7,000. If it does, the plan worked. Separately, and it is a different question, the median wage either recovers once the cutting stops or it settles at the lower number, and that answer describes what kind of company came out the other side.
Sources
- Cincinnati Enquirer, P&G disclosed its pay for its CEO as well as its median worker, 31 August 2026, for the $17.9 million and $9.2 million pay figures, the 94.5% increase, the $68,600 and $79,500 median wage, the 13.7% fall, the 278 to 1 and 276 to 1 ratios, the 5,000 and 7,000 job figures, the 104,000 and 109,000 headcount, and the $16 billion profit on $87 billion sales with 1% organic growth
- Procter & Gamble, 2026 proxy statement, the filing the pay disclosures come from
- Procter & Gamble, leadership team, for his current title and the 1 August 2026 chairman effective date, checked 1 September 2026
