Communication is more often than not a checkbox in the vision documents of most merger deals. What this translates to is a whole set of checkboxes and to-do lists under that, that a few are tasked with implementing and fewer still comprehend why. The front lines especially, are usually the first to be impacted but the last to know. Corporate communication honchos frequently get the basics wrong often leading to hilarious outcomes.
Companies communicate but fail to connect. This is precisely what the employees of a known consulting firm experienced when they were acquired by a leading IT services company. As part of the integration effort, complex organisation structure modifications were rolled out, operational captains were briefed over month-long simulations, and communication from the leadership flowed with clockwork precision on a 24×5 basis for well over two business quarters. Someone had even thought of personalized “Integration Coffee Mugs” to go with the mood.
Everything was hunky dory till a glaring communication lapse started being noticed. Consultants exiting projects suddenly found themselves with no quick line of sight to their next engagement. Project managers they had worked with last ceased to respond to their queries on deployment possibilities on other projects the managers were heading. The dreaded resource “bench” started to pile up. What had transpired was that, in the pre-merger scenario, consultants of the acquired entity used to liase with their project managers for future deployments. The acquirer, on the other
Someone had even thought of personalized “Integration Coffee Mugs” to go with the mood.
hand, had a separate resource management team that took care of project deployments. No big deal, except that somebody forgot to inform the employees of the acquired firm! The subsequent damage control did little to assuage the interim blushes but did undermine change management procedures.
One size hits all. This one is a classic corporate blooper even if cliched. Quite often you come across leadership headsets that equate employees to resources that “need to be managed”. Give your people good work, good pay and a fun workplace and they’ll swear by you no matter what, right? Wrong. M&A transactions can change other things that people care about. Like who they’re going to be working with for the next appraisal cycle and who or what decides that. Or that something that’s been working so long is not “re-engineered” as part of a merger integration. Or how much of the pay package is taxable. In the case it’s inevitable that mergers alter such everyday truths, not only is the worker to be kept informed, but be treated as a thinking mind that needs to be engaged, not just managed. In the instance of the IT services firm earlier, the damage control exercise would have been much more effective and less unilateral had the engagement been deeper and, more significantly, two-way.
Over-communication can’t hurt. This is one hot-air balloon that’s bereft of all sandbags. A myth propagated by the well-meaning but paranoid corporate communication apparatus of most enterprises. One global outsourcing vendor, which acquired a smaller niche firm, is known to have churned out communication on the deal to its workforce with the frequency of an industrial drill. So predictable and over-zealous had the communication machinery become in the aftermath of the merger that inboxes of most lower-ranking associates in the acquiring company were known to have rules set to automatically filter out e-mails from the corporate communications id or with specific subject lines to their junk folders!
Interestingly, this can also happen in pre-merger scenarios during the “rumor phase”, as was evident in one case where the chairman of one of the firms involved in an outright acquisition deal sent out nine e-mails over a space of three months to the entire workforce denying the deal. That’s almost one e-mail per week to your employees talking about something that hasn’t happened! An overkill of denials is bound to attract suspicion to the contrary i.e. that there may be some truth to those rumors after all. Human psychology 101.
Let perception be reality’s poorer cousin. A merger of two companies usually results in a merger of its support functions. In several cases “merging functions” actually do not merge operationally but remain a notional concept. If two support functions are not merging, you have no business insinuating that they are, political appropriateness be damned. Yet, many corporate communication teams tend to paint all functions with similar brush strokes and integration task force members have been known to offer platitudes such as “Oh, for the sake of completeness..” or “we need to be seen as being fair to all functions!” when probed why. The results are obvious. The corporate grapevine becomes active, managers start groping at invisible adversaries and the integration effort runs a real risk of functional derailment.
Communication around M&A deals and integration bootcamps is a granular and often painstakingly customized work that centers around a connect with your heroes: the rank and file. The more you see your people as intelligent and self-aware individuals who can tell you what to tell them, the less they fit into those checkboxes and start fitting into your clients’ checkbooks.
