As a HR leader, you may be no stranger to the complexities of a merger and acquisition (M&A). In such times of transition, integrating diverse cultures, maintaining open communication, aligning HR policies, ensuring inclusivity, and sustaining engagement are paramount. But how exactly do you do that?
We’ll give you a helping hand by delving into targeted strategies to overcome these challenges and emerge stronger from the process.
Before the merger: Preparing with employee voice
Let’s start right at the beginning. Before the merger even takes place, leveraging employee voice can be invaluable. Conducting surveys or focus groups to understand the prevailing culture, values, and concerns within both organisations can provide crucial insights.
This early understanding allows HR leaders to anticipate potential areas of friction and proactively develop strategies to address them.
Seeking input from employees about their expectations and apprehensions regarding the merger can help in crafting communication plans and change management strategies tailored to their needs.
For instance, you may have employees who have concerns about the future of their role. Are they still going to enjoy their job, do they get the same benefits, are they even going to still have a job? These are all questions and concerns that are valid and that your people may need reassurance or answers for.
Offering wellbeing support at this time to help those who are concerned is important to help your people navigate these changes.
Integrating diverse cultures and values
Merging different organisational cultures, values, and working styles can spark friction and resistance among employees. Why? Because people may be comfortable and confident with the way things are. Now there’s change and uncertainty, and that can lead to discomfort.
For instance, the Hive values look like this:
Now, if you think about your company values, we can almost guarantee they don’t all resemble ours. That’s because different things work for different people and organisations.
To address this, having employee engagement surveys to gather insights into the values, preferences, and concerns of employees from both merging entities can help with building a more harmonious environment.
By incorporating qualitative feedback, you can develop a unified culture that respects and integrates the strengths of both organisations.
Maintaining open and effective communication
Establishing transparent, two-way communication channels is vital during a merger and acquisition. This is crucial. As we’ve mentioned earlier, not everyone is comfortable with change. So it’s your job as a leader to be there to support any concerns or challenges your people may have.
Continuous feedback, like Hive Open Door, enables real-time sharing of thoughts, suggestions, and concerns, fostering a culture of openness.
For leaders, when using tools like employee voice platforms, dashboard features can help you to track feedback trends and respond promptly to emerging issues, ensuring that every employee feels heard and valued.
*Remember – Not every suggestion requires a change or an action. But ensuring you have the means to listen, understand, action or reassure can help your people feel supported during this transition.
Aligning HR policies
The easy part. 👀
Policies! Creating a unified set of HR policies and benefits for a larger and more diverse workforce requires careful consideration.
Surveys can help gauge employee satisfaction with existing policies and identify areas of disparity or concern. Analysing feedback allows for informed policy revisions that align with the collective needs and expectations of the expanded workforce.
Ensuring inclusivity and equity
Inclusivity is key to success in a merged environment. Imagine you’ve doubled your number of employees through this process. How do you ensure they all feel listened to, understood and valued for their unique perspectives, experiences, and contributions? How do you avoid potential cliques and division from team members sticking with their past colleagues?
In a merged environment, fostering a culture where every individual feels listened to, understood, and valued is essential for maximising employee engagement, productivity, and overall success.
Deploy targeted surveys, and feedback tools to assess the effectiveness of diversity and inclusion initiatives and identify any perceived barriers to equity.
By analysing feedback and implementing actionable strategies, you can foster an inclusive culture where diversity is seen as a strength.
You can even go one step further and introduce recognition tools where peers can recognise and applaud contributions of one another to foster a supportive culture.
Sustaining engagement during change
Sustaining employee engagement during times of change is crucial for maintaining productivity and morale.
In addition to pulse surveys, consider implementing regular check-ins or town hall meetings to provide updates and address concerns. Offering a mix of digital and in-person options to feedback can help improve responses, so there’s an option to suit more people.
Why? Because including your people later down the line could result in disengagement, uncertainty, and decreased morale, ultimately undermining the success of the merger or acquisition.
Need support with understanding how you can sustain employee engagement throughout the merger or acquisition process within your organisation? Hive People Science team can facilitate ‘Design Better Days at Work With Hive’ workshop sessions with our customers aimed at fostering open and honest communication from the get go. Find out more below.
Experience a workshop that sets the foundation for a successful employee voice initiative and empower your team to drive meaningful change with our employee workshop – fostering open and honest communication from the get-go.
Through a mixture of presented materials and facilitated discussion, we’ll delve into what makes a great workday for everyone and their role as a key influencer of their organisation’s employee experience.
The value here is that:
- Improved outcomes through early employee involvement.
- Increased understanding of areas for improvement from frontline perspectives.
- Encouragement of open and honest communication.
- Third-party facilitation through a safe and secure environment.
This direct communication and inclusion can help foster transparency and build trust among employees, seeing for a successful outcome.
Implementing the strategy
Implementing the strategy involves a series of crucial steps aimed at harnessing the insights gathered from employee feedback and transforming them into actionable plans for organisational improvement. It’s important to hear everyone’s voice and responsibility in implementing the strategy.
Our People Science team host sessions with leaders in organisations we work with to explore how leadership involvement drives positive change, fostering impactful results. See below or chat with us to find out more.
Employee engagement shouldn’t just be a HR responsibility, it should be owned and advocated by leaders to drive real change. This leads to successful, sustainable and impactful results.
It’s important to underscore the significance of strategy and creating organisational readiness in this process. By establishing the purpose of employee voice and illustrating how it connects to your goals, you can ensure that your initiatives are not only well-informed but also effectively executed, driving meaningful change within the organisation.
- Integration and analysis: Centralise data collected from surveys to perform comprehensive analysis, identifying common themes and differences across the combined workforce.
Top tip: When working with an employee voice platform provider, having access to the likes of their people science/occupational psychology team can really help with this part of the strategy. For instance, Hive’s People Science team offer a range of reporting modules as shown below that can help with providing the story in your data to help and support with the changes that need to be made, and coach you on how to act on them.
Your headline data and key metrics in a clear and concise one-page report – so you can forget struggling to interpret complex data and graphs. You’ll have easily digestible information, perfect for any communication channels.
A comprehensive analysis of your organisational-level results, providing deeper insights in two demographics. It includes a review of your key metrics, analysis of driving factors, and context from your chosen free text item. Using their expertise, our team of business psychologists will also use wider context and your previous results to provide a continuous narrative throughout the report, as well as an executive summary and key areas for action.
You’ll find a review of your chosen key metrics, analysis of what’s driving those results, and added context from up to two free text items. Your data points will be broken down by up to 4 demographics and benchmarked against previous results. All those numbers are great, but we then go a step further. Every survey comes with a hidden story. So, using wider context and our own team of business psychologists, we wrap all that data up with continuous narrative throughout, an executive summary alongside key areas for action.
- Action planning and follow-up: Develop action plans based on survey insights, communicate these plans to employees, and establish a timeline for implementation. Close the feedback loop by reporting back to employees on actions taken. A ‘you said, we did’ approach can help employees see their feedback is being used to make change.
This way employees can see tangible progress being made based on their feedback, fostering a sense of ownership and accountability within the organisation.
At Hive, we believe in driving impactful change from within. That’s why we offer two dynamic actioning change workshops with our People Science team to equip your organisation for success.
Support your managers to continue the conversation with their teams, and confidently share ownership of turning insights into action.
Facilitating the internal rollout of the actioning change workshop for your project team to support managers to drive.
- Customisation and personalisation: Customise the survey experience to reflect the diverse needs of the workforce, ensuring relevance and increasing participation rates.
This includes offering multiple language options, flexible timing, asking bespoke questions, and segmenting responses based on demographics.
Explore below to learn how Hive offers surveys crafted with precision by our People Science team to suit your unique needs.
Utilising a People Scientist to craft bespoke surveys based on your specific requirements, whether that is a themed survey
on performance management or a baseline survey aligned to your people strategy, the surveys will be precisely crafted to measure exactly what you need. You can also bring in our People Scientists for personalised hands-on support in creating up to 3 bespoke surveys over the course of a year.
By tailoring the survey experience to reflect the unique preferences and concerns of different employee groups, participation rates are likely to increase. Employees are more likely to engage with surveys that feel relevant to their experiences, leading to richer and more actionable feedback for HR leaders to work with.
Implementing the strategy requires a thoughtful and systematic approach, from analysing survey data to developing action plans and customising the survey experience. By following these steps diligently, HR leaders can harness the power of employee feedback to drive meaningful change and foster a culture of continuous improvement within the organisation.
Conquering merger and acquisition challenges with employee voice
So, those challenges that can come with a merger and acquisition can simply be small hurdles you can take big leaps over when you know how to navigate them, right? Strategic use of tools like employee voice platforms is essential for navigating HR challenges during mergers.
Tools such as employee voice platforms play a crucial role in this journey. By fostering a culture of inclusivity, transparency, and shared purpose, we pave the way for the success of teams and the achievement of organisational goals.
Stay tuned for more insights on effective HR leadership during times of change.
Want to learn further how Hive’s employee voice platform and People Science team could help your organisation through a successful merger and acquisition process? Chat with us today.
