Don’t take a back seat

By Bruce Christie

Published:

IF IT’S true that people are an organisation’s greatest asset and the source of its competitive advantage, then surely they should come pretty high up the priority list when it comes to merger and acquisition activity.

In reality, however, the pressures of the negotiation and due diligence process can often lead to the anxieties of employees taking a back seat in favour of the boardroom discussions.

There are, however, steps that can be taken to ensure that staff in both companies are up to speed with what’s happening.

By treating redundancies sensitively and investing in team-building, managers will help ensure that the newly acquired or merged company hits the ground running.

As with all situations where job losses are possible, it is critical to communicate fully and openly with employees in order to ensure both legal compliance and minimisation of disruption.

If redundancies are likely, then it serves an organisation well to have an established system of assessing performance in place – an appraisal programme or, ideally, a competence-based assessment system can enable employees to understand what is happening and why, and helps better performers have confidence that they will not be selected for redundancy if these systems are operated professionally.

If all employees are blithely labelled “satisfactory”, then the system is worse than useless. If the two organisations involved do not have similar systems for assessing employee performance, then this is a clear area for concern – how otherwise can two individuals in different organisations be compared?

Even with such systems and with an open channel of communication, there exists the “survivor syndrome”, where those employees who remain with an organisation find the whole process so distasteful and upsetting that they lose their own motivation and look to work elsewhere.

This can be eased by support for those remaining in the organisation so that they understand what the future may hold and what development opportunities may exist, and also by the provision of outplacement services for redundant staff to ease their transition to a new position elsewhere.

Bruce Christie leads the excellence team of Facilitators International, the Aberdeen-based corporate performance-improvement consultancy