Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

Add Another Log to the Fire: HP Employees Grumble About Loss of Stock Grants

Given the events of the past 18 months or so — two new CEOs, a brief flirtation with a significant spinoff, the failure and then marginalization of an important consumer product and an unpopular and expensive acquisition — it’s probably no surprise that morale among employees at Hewlett-Packard has dropped significantly in recent months.

But now, many employees in HP’s mid-tier management ranks have something new to grumble about. Some 700 to 900 HP employees who have been participants in a three-year-old HP stock bonus plan learned right before the holidays that they would not be receiving the payout of shares they expected.

The program concerns what HP refers to as PRUs, or Performance-based Restricted Units, and is described in detail in HP’s 10-K and proxy filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It was created both as a performance-based bonus and also as a retention plan for certain HP management-level employees at the vice president level and higher.

In a Dec. 12 internal HP email obtained by AllThingsD, employees participating in the program were told that they wouldn’t be receiving a payout for 2011, and that shares accrued during HP’s fiscal years 2010 and 2009 would also be lost.

To explain:

Under the terms of the program, employees received grants representing hypothetical shares of HP stock that were to have been paid out at the end of the three-year period ending Oct. 31, 2011. Had HP met the stated cash flow and shareholder return goals, the shares would have been paid out to employees sometime in December.

Instead, employees were told that they would receive no payout from the PRU program at all, not for 2011, nor for 2010 or 2009.

This is, of course, exactly how the PRU program was to work: With HP’s goals not met, there was no payout to give. And while other equity-based bonuses and grant programs remain in force, for employees in the mid-level ranks — not those in the senior ranks already earning half-million-dollar salaries or more — PRUs represented an important benefit.

It’s not clear exactly how much HP would have been required to pay had the company met the PRU program’s requirements. The company’s most recent 10-K filing said that it had “$82 million of unrecognized pre-tax stock-based compensation expense related to PRUs with an assigned fair value,” but now that the payout has been canceled entirely, it no longer has to account for that amount, nor for any previous year’s PRUs.

Whatever the total amount involved, affected employees who stood to receive PRUs are seething about how and when they were told they wouldn’t be receiving them.

The email, delivered to certain managers on Dec. 12, contained instructions on talking with subordinates about their annual performance review and the rewards they could expect. The subject line was: “Deliver the One conversation.”

It reads, in part:

Managers with FY09 Performance-based Restrictued Unit (PRU) Award Holders

We have the final performance results for the FY09 Performance-based Restricted Unit award, which was based on HP’s performance from FY09-FY11. As you will recall, the performance metrics for the FY09 PRUs were:

1. HP’s annual cash flow from operations as a percentage of revenue for each of FY09, FY10 and FY11, and

2. HP’s Total Shareholder Return (TSR) for the FY09-FY11 period relative to the S&P 500

As a result of the change in HP’s stock price over the three-year period, the TSR requirements were not achieved, and no shares will be released from the FY09 PRU award.

Of course, we are very disappointed that there is no payout this year from this program, and you have specific management actions to communicate the final disposition of this grant for FY09 PRU award holders. The actions are:

— During the One Conversation, you will also need to address the outcome of the FY09-11 PRUs with employees on your team who are FY09 PRU Award Holders

— Please review the FY09 PRU Talking Points and PRU FAQs [Here the email contains links to internal HP documents I have not seen. -Ed] to prepare to have this discussion with your affected employees, who are listed below: [Here the printed copy of the email I received has several listed names blacked out.]

For any other questions about FPR, please ask Contact HR.

Regards,
Evan Wittenberg, VP, Global Talent

Stan Dunlap, VP, Global Rewards

And here’s some more detail about how the PRU program worked, taken from HP’s 10-K and proxy filings:

HP employees who participated in the PRU plan could track the accrued amounts of their PRUs on a Merrill Lynch Web site. I talked to two sources, both of whom had accrued PRUs worth between $100,000 and $200,000 for fiscal 2009 and 2010. Other less senior employees who received PRUs would have accrued between $20,000 and $50,000 in their accounts.

One source told me that as rumors began to circulate that PRUs would not be paid for 2011, most people assumed that the accrued amounts for 2009 and 2010 would still be paid. How wrong that assumption was became apparent on Monday, Dec. 11, as the amounts in their Merrill Lynch PRU accounts plummeted to zero. As recently as Dec. 9, the prior Friday, the value of the accrued PRUs for 2009 and 2010 were still displayed.

HP CEO Meg Whitman discussed the decision not to pay out PRUs in a conference call with HP’s top 900 executives days later. According to people who were on the conference call, Whitman primarily blamed the economy.

Despite the fact that HP followed the PRU program’s provisions correctly, affected employees are grumbling that management has “crossed a line.” As one source put it to me, revealing the decision during the weeks leading up to Christmas was “unconscionable.”

“If they will cross this line now, there’s no line they won’t cross later,” said one source, a current HP employee who asked not to be named. “They could have played straight with us and told us this was coming months ago. The way they’ve done this is not in keeping with the HP way.”

The decision is hurting morale at a time when HP needs to hold on to its people. One source, who left HP recently for another company, says he is routinely being peppered with resumes from HP employees looking to jump ship.

Update:
An HP spokesman says of the PRU program that compensation is tied to performance and the 2011 fiscal year wasn’t a good one for HP. Still other bonus programs did pay out. “High-performing employees were still eligible for salary, stock and bonus awards that year.”

As to the timing of the decision, he said since HP’s fiscal year ends on Oct. 31, it’s natural that compensation decisions fall in December. “That’s the time every year that we do raises and award bonuses. That is when these things are announced.”

Of course, many of the affected employees are blaming HP’s prior generation of management for not meeting results, as well as its board of directors. HP shares fell considerably during the 11-month period that Léo Apotheker was CEO, and it was on his watch that the company shook the confidence of investors, as it missed quarterly earnings targets three times in a row.

This probably won’t make them feel any better, but Apotheker is affected by the loss of PRUs, too: Under terms of his separation agreement, Apotheker was to have received 424,000 PRUs which on paper would be worth $12 million and change, given Monday’s share price. But according to his contract on file with the SEC, his PRU grants were made under the same rules as those made to other employees. That means they’re gone, just like those of other affected HP employees.

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