2023, A Year Of Resilience In Action

The year 2023 has been the most challenging year for our People and Culture team at Paysend. The same can be said for my own career.? Despite this tough year, when I step back to look at what we have been able to achieve in the face of all the challenges and obstacles, it’s also been the most productive and creative year for both the people and culture team at Paysend and my own career.? This reminds me of the old proverb that tells us that “necessity is the mother of invention.”

That sounds nice, doesn’t it? If only it were so simple. In reality, it wasn’t just necessity that pushed us, it was how we came together as a team, supported each other, stretched ourselves, and leveraged each other's strengths that enabled us to succeed in 2023. So when I step back and see how far we've come, and the impact we’ve had as a team and Paysend as a whole, I can honestly say I'm proud.

This article therefore isn’t about sharing a laundry list of all the cool things we've done (we’ll share a few of course), but instead, it's about sharing some of the challenges we overcame as a team with some of the insights we’ve gained along the way. These lessons no doubt will continue to play out in my own career, and I suspect that they may be useful to others along the way.

The challenges we faced:

Let’s just say the economy this year hasn't been the most promising for finance or tech, or even fintech. We’ve seen a number of large-scale layoffs and challenges throughout each of the three industries mentioned above. While navigating these unpredictable economic currents, Paysend has had to relook at its structure and how it operates this year too. We started the year off with a strong people and culture team, but by the end of Q1 we had to restructure our team. We had a grand vision of what we were going to achieve in 2023 but by March we had to relook at that vision.

There were two real options that we could choose from. We could either reduce the load and manage expectations or we could find a way to work smarter, free up our bandwidth to enable us to execute our original 2023 plan and deliver on the new needs of the organisation. What would you have chosen?

At Paysend, we are what you might call a hungry team, a team that takes great pride in their work and isn’t afraid to take on a challenge. So naturally, we chose to find ways to work smarter and to work better, together.?

Working smarter and better, together:

The people and culture team, as well as Paysend as a whole, had already been getting better each quarter with company and divisional objectives and key results (OKRs). Having this habit already formed was crucial for helping us overcome some of the changes and obstacles that we were facing, as it meant that our team was able to stay focused on driving meaningful impact. For example we continued to drive improvements in engagement scores (on average we improved by 6% over the year), perceived belonging and connection (we observed a 10% increase here), and finally performance (over 90% of Paysenders gained personal development plan and they received regular structured feedback).

We had to change was how we came together as a team in order to deliver. For us that meant we aligned on a new day we could all come together and review progress, bring up any blockers, and collaborate on any tasks. From there we also asked a new team member to lead this call every week. These simple changes really helped to enable our team to have more impact and it brought us closer together. This increased closeness and transparency is what I consider a crucial ingredient for the resilience and success we’ve had over 2023.

It seemed that we were on the right track to working better together and to some degree smarter, but we still had a bandwidth issue to address. In reality, our team was cut in half, so how could we overcome that?

The answer is quite simple really. Although we are the people and culture team, we do not and cannot own culture. Company culture is and always will be owned by the collective group of people that make up the company. That means we all have a shared ownership; from the CEO, to an intern, to customer service and even finance.?

What we did then is tap into this shared culture and leverage our amazing Paysenders to help us shape, develop, drive, and deliver world-class programs. That meant we started reaching out in focus groups, surveys, and more to redefine our benefits, apply to and attend award ceremonies, manage our offices and events, do internal communication interviews, design and deliver pieces of training, and so much more. This doesn’t mean that we just handed projects off to others, but instead, we brought them along with us. This meant that not only were we building programs but these programs were more meaningful and were bringing other Paysenders closer together. For a remote-friendly environment like Paysend, this was a win-win-win!

To continue to free up our bandwidth, we also took a hard look on the inside of our processes and collaborated with our IT and tech teams to help us automate. This resulted in our teams leveraging tools such as Jira and Confluence to create an automated people and culture help desk as well as a self-service centre to ensure that we could support the everyday needs and questions of other Paysenders.?

Going beyond expectations:

As we leveraged technology to free up our bandwidth and our wider collective of Paysenders to help us implement meaningful programs, we were able to go beyond expectations and deliver more of what Paysenders told us they wanted and needed. In any year, this would be something anyone would be proud to be a part of, in a year like 2023 I want to shout it from the mountaintops.?

One clear area where we did this was internal comms. For Paysend, as a business in 2023, each of our divisions were laser-focused on executing various OKRs that it had become harder for everyone to see the big picture. This helped us realise that our internal comms strategy needed some work. With that, a very scrappy team of a few Paysenders came together to create a weekly video program that became so much more than expected. We called it the Paysend Pulse, as it was meant to help us communicate more frequently and transparently about all things happening in Paysend, with a sense of satirical humour and a level of cheese that everyone could appreciate. The response from Paysenders was clear, it was working and we needed to do more of it.? Check out this highlight reel from 2023!?

Throughout the year, we continued to refine our approach and add new segments to it. Eventually, new video and live programs spun out such as the Paysend Spotlight & Connect (focusing on celebrating teams and individuals so we could understand more of what others are doing), new joiner videos (so we know who has joined us and what they are working on) and we even dropped a scary movie trailer to promote our newest DEI initiatives around unconscious bias. We are all really proud of the creative approach and autonomy we’ve had as well as the impact that our internal comms strategy has had on the culture at Paysend. Moreover, it is great to see that valuable work can be fun, even in difficult times.

All in all, it has taken resilience, adaptability, and a lot of collaboration to get through the year, but looking back at what we’ve done, it truly seems the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I’ve never been as proud of a team as I am today, and as 2024 starts to gear up, I am excited to see what it will bring. As our people and culture team continues to change, and I am confident that we will remain nimble and find new ways to work better and smarter, together. However, I would love to hear what key takeaway lessons you might have learned throughout your year. Share any insights below to and help all of us take 2024 by the horns!