Occidental Petroleum said the company’s lead independent director and the chair of the executive compensation and human resources committee will participate in a F&C Asset Management hosted call with institutional investors to discuss corporate governance issues later this month.

An Occidental spokesman said: “This is part of Oxy’s continued outreach efforts to make sure that board decisions reflect the input of our most important constituents – Oxy’s stockholders.”

Deborah Gilshan, corporate governance counsel at the UK’s Railpen Investments, and Elizabeth McGeveran, senior vice president at F&C Asset Management, have been visiting corporates this week asking them to consider holding a ”fifth analyst call”.

The call is in addition to the traditional four quarterly earnings calls. It follows the public filing of the company's proxy statement and enables investors to decide on issues such as whether to endorse the compensation plan and to consider the actions of the directors during the previous year.

Gilshan told Financial News: “Although not every company has endorsed the idea, the discussions have been positive. Although companies have investor outreach programs, these tend only to deal with their largest shareholders and can lead to frustration that their only channel of communication is through proxy advisory firms.”

McGeveran said: “Companies are hungry to create alternative ways of communicating with shareholders in a non-adversarial manner. This year’s proxy season could be groundbreaking in the US if there are a lot of investor votes against compensation schemes so companies are willing to discuss a much greater range of techniques.”

-write to shanny.basar@dowjones.com