Mergers & Acquisitions - How to Help Employees Stay Productive

While mergers and acquisitions have powerful market potential, their success is greatly dependent upon effectively integrating the cultures of the merging entities. In fact, organisations often struggle to integrate successfully, leading to a decline in employee engagement and dire consequences to the bottom line.

While organisational culture is important in a merger’s success, it’s often dismissed as a ‘soft’ concept; in the flurries of paperwork, legalities, processes and redundancies, most leaders are understandably focused on deadlines and costs. However the trickle-down effect on employees can cause uncertainty, fear, frustration and stress. Left unattended, the impact on employees’ work both during and after the merger can take years to counteract.

Plans for an employee engagement program are crucial prior to the start of the merger. Once the merge begins, no one will have the capacity to initiate one. You need to be ready to launch using a few key strategies to minimise the upheaval and keep your teams focused on moving forward.

1. Create unity

   • Ensuring that employees are united and motivated around a common mission is one way to set the foundations for an integrated organisational culture. Help alleviate their fears about the future through storytelling – where the company has been, where it’s going, and how they make an impact on getting there. Include the “what’s in it for me” and be boldly transparent with your communications. The most detrimental things happen when employees are forced to make their own narrative. Keep them focused with a consistent, frequent and honest rallying cry.
     
     

2. Empower managers

   • Once a common mission is communicated, empower managers to define, recognise, reinforce and reward behaviours that demonstrate a commitment to it. Due to the implicit nature of organisational culture, it is important to be aware that overtly intentional moves to impose a new culture can fail. Focusing on desired behaviours is a more successful way to ensure both employee engagement and long-term cultural change.
     
     

3. Enable peer-to-peer recognition

   • Mergers commonly include redundancies, role changes and new processes – all of which increase the workload and puts pressure on individuals. Team dynamics change and people need to build new relationships while learning new skills. Giving all employees a tool to recognise each other for their efforts can make a huge impact on employee motivation.
     
     

4. Cultivate gratitude

   • Amongst the upheaval of a merger or acquisition, the simple act of cultivating gratitude and saying thank you to staff can be more important and reassuring than ever. At no cost, this simple action can calm, unify and engage employees while assisting them to cope with stress.
     
     

5. Measure it

   • Employee engagement throughout a merger can easily be measured via recognition and reward activity. To take it to another level however, consider pre- and post-merger surveys. Utilise pulse surveys or happiness meters throughout so that managers can swiftly take action when their employees trend downward. Above all, ask for feedback on what is or isn’t working and be willing to act quickly when the qualitative or quantitative data says something has gone amiss.
     
     

Get in touch to learn more about how BI WORLDWIDE can help you ensure employee engagement and successful shifts in organisational culture during a merger or acquisition.