Executives at technology companies such as Zoom Video Communications, Intel and Micron Technology have taken cuts to their base salary this year as their businesses trimmed spending and laid off workers. And as was the case during the pandemic, the cuts to base pay have gone beyond chief executives to include finance chiefs, operations leaders and corporate attorneys.

Before the pandemic, compensation experts say, executives’ base salary typically had been left alone during periods of corporate belt-tightening. In response to the pandemic, 20% of businesses in the Russell 1000 announced pay cuts for leadership in 2020, according to Just Capital, a nonprofit tracking how American public companies perform on issues such as worker pay, health and safety. Just Capital hasn’t tracked the trend since.

“Executives felt a real obligation to send a message to the world, ‘Hey, we’re in this with you, we’re going to feel the pain along with you,’ and so that’s why they” reduced salaries during the pandemic, said Don Lowman, who advises on executive compensation as global leader of consulting firm Korn Ferry’s total rewards practice, which focuses on employee salaries, incentives and other rewards. “Now, companies are doing layoffs again, and maybe they’re using the playbook that they established back in the early stage of the pandemic.”

Consider pandemic darling Zoom. Growth at the San Jose, Calif.-based company—which had tripled in size in two years when businesses turned to its videoconferencing software during the pandemic—began to cool in 2022 and this year as companies started calling employees back to offices and people returned to in-person activities. CEO Eric Yuan in February announced Zoom was laying off 15% of its staff, or 1,300 people.

But the cuts went beyond the rank and file. Yuan’s base salary was cut by 98%, to $10,000, for fiscal 2024, which ends Jan. 31, 2024. His salary for fiscal 2023, at $402,962, made up less than 1% of his total pay of nearly $76 million, most of which consisted of long-term stock awards. Base salaries of other top executives—including Chief Financial Officer Kelly Steckelberg and Chief Operating Officer Aparna Bawa—were reduced by 20% for the current fiscal year. The executives also forfeited their fiscal 2023 bonuses.

Yuan in a Zoom chat with executives early this year said he planned to cut his compensation, according to Steckelberg. Other executives in the chat “immediately” volunteered to do the same, said the CFO. “There was very strong alignment around that,” she said.

Salary cuts are a way to indicate that executives acknowledge and are sympathetic to difficult economic times, said Jannice Koors, senior managing director at compensation advisory firm Pearl Meyer. Reducing base salary is also a way to lower expenses, though companies generally don’t say how much they are expecting to save.

But it may also be perceived largely as a token gesture, compensation advisers say.

Base pay is often the smallest part of an executive’s pay package, making up 11% of chief executives’ overall compensation in fiscal year 2022, according to a Korn Ferry study of CEO pay at 300 of the largest U.S. public companies. “Taking a 25% cut on base salary is truly more of a symbolic kind of action than it is a real significant economic action,” said Lowman. “It is very much intended to be a message to the outside world, as well as to employees: Our executives are sharing the pain that we’re going through.”

Along with Zoom, executives from Dublin-based data-storage company Seagate Technology and Matawan, N.J.-based home builder Hovnanian Enterprises have also recently seen their compensation chopped amid broader cost-cutting efforts.

For six months beginning in May, the salaries of Seagate’s CEO and CFO have been reduced by 100%, and the chief commercial officer’s by 50%, while the company aims for $200 million in annualized savings starting in the first quarter of fiscal 2024, according to a filing with regulators. Meanwhile, Hovnanian senior executives took salary reductions as the company looked to trim further certain costs in the quarter ended April 30, CEO Ara Hovnanian told analysts in May. The CEOs’ salaries for their most recent fiscal years represented less than 10% of their respective total pay.