Resiliency and Opportunity

Greg Pappas is Vice President, Human Resources at CyberSource, an ecommerce payment management company. He is a member of the HR Forums and the HR Forums Advisory Board.

Greg: We've actually had a phenomenal year this year. eCommerece continues to be a strong market segment and while consumers have slowed their spending, they continue to use the Internet as a cost effective and practical way to purchase products. eCommerece experienced an uptick in transactions when the price of gas was really high; people gravitated more to eCommerce. They felt more and more comfortable and secure with it. You don't have to drive. You don't have to fight the crowds. And you can ship things all over the world.

The average transaction amount has been lower for all the retailers because of all the heavy discounting. But we've actually had a record volume. One great example of how ecommerce is growing is the explosion of online music over the last couple of years. iTunes is now the biggest music store in the world. Now it's $.99 you know, it's not a huge purchase, but it adds up, and it's all online. Small transactions, big volume.

I'm in a unique situation as VP of HR at Cybersource because we've got a great story unfolding and we still think it's kind of in its infancy.

Aryae: What are your hiring plans for this year?

Greg: We did the majority of our hiring in 2008, but we do have plans to grow our headcount this year.

Aryae: As far as you can tell, what's the mood these days among your employees?

Greg: I think most employees are feeling really good about our company and what we're doing. We have a company wide bonus program that we pay out in January and there is a sense that we will pay out some kind of bonus for our 2008 performance.

I think I'm a good example of how new employees feel about our company. There were a few companies I was considering after [my last company] was acquired and I tell you, I'm happy as heck that I chose Cybersource. I think most employees share how I feel. They're in a good, good business and have the opportunity to work in a great environment.

Now on the other hand, I think everybody here at Cybersource has been impacted by the economy, by the stock market. Everyone's net worth has been hurt. Everybody has friends or relatives who have been laid off, or knows of somebody that has been laid off.

I think in general when we have these conditions everybody goes to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? Do I have a job? Can I put food on my table? Do I have shelter? And then hopefully we get some job satisfaction and career growth.

Right now I think people are thankful that they have a job, that they have a good place that they come into work, that the company is being successful, that we're not looking at pay cuts. But people here are not naive. They read the papers just like everybody else. I think that definitely weighs on them.

Aryae: Are you doing anything different in terms of communicating with employees than you might have done in a previous year?

Greg: I think in these times you need to magnify communications. I'm having more and more focus group meetings. We're having a company wide kick off this Friday. We used to do annual performance reviews. Everybody is now on a quarterly review process. We've modified our quarterly all hands meetings to ensure the important things are being addressed. Our CEO is starting to send out monthly updates and raise his visibiltiy. And me as the VP of HR, I'm making myself more available, going out to the various sites, having breakfast meetings, and roundtable discussion to get a sense of what the issues are. Making sure that management is visible and available is a critical role for HR.

We set up an anonymous email question system when I first got here, and we've been getting some really good questions. We publish those on a monthly basis. That's really helped. You know, people get brave when it's anonymous. We get some pretty tough questions. When you answer those and don't dodge them, you create credibility.

And then each department has an all hands meeting when they have a major milestone that's been accomplished, so we continue to do those things.

Some of this stuff is basics. But basics are very powerful. I've always been a big fan of keeping things simple and not getting too complicated. I think that sometimes less is more in terms of the complexity, but I do think in these times frequency is really important. Management being visible is really important.

Aryae: When you get together with the senior management team, is there a sense of when the economy and the business are going to start turning around?

Greg: Yeah, we kind of think, the general kind of mood is, Q4, going into Q1 of next year. I mean the good thing is, we've been in this thing for a year, right? But we don't have a crystal ball! We're being very optimistic yet cautious.

A perfect example is our company wide kick off this month. Our theme for 2009 is "Resiliency and Opportunity." We have to be resilient because things can get worse and we have to be ready for that. But we also think this could be a year of opportunity where we can win some business and grow our market share, so we want to be more aggressive on that end.