cover feature
For HR, few endeavours are as high risk, high reward as
mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Organizations head into
M&A transactions with their sights set on some kind of
gain. In building a new organization, there’s tremendous
opportunity for HR to help craft new policies, shift culture and
find new ways of developing and retaining talent. But between the
moment of the merger announcement and its completion, the or-ganizations
involved are in flux and unstable, with key business
drivers like engagement, productivity and retention potentially
hanging in the balance.
The nature of M&As in recent years makes things even more
complex. In the past, they were often a relatively simple process
of tucking a smaller company into a larger one and borrowing the
norms of the mother ship. Now, a good number are downright
transformational.
In fact, PwC’s 2017 M&A Integration Survey Report found
more than half of Fortune 1,000 survey respondents described the
largest transaction they completed in the last three years as trans-formational
(defined as deals that involve acquiring new markets,
channels, products or operations in a way that is transformative to
the fully integrated organization).
This kind of M&A upends an organization’s way of doing things.
“In a truly transformational acquisition or merger, you’re cre-ating
something new, something that didn’t exist in the past,” said
Cheryl Fullerton, EVP of people and communications at Corus
Entertainment. “You have to rethink everything, all the way from
your operating model, to structure, to policies, to systems. And
“YOU’VE GOT TO CHALLENGE
YOUR ASSUMPTIONS, KEEP
YOUR EARS OPEN AND BE
HUMBLE ENOUGH TO REALIZE
THAT EVEN IF YOU THOUGHT
YOU WERE COMMUNICATING
ENOUGH, IF PEOPLE
AREN’T UNDERSTANDING
WHAT’S GOING ON,
THEN YOU WEREN’T.”
– CHERYL FULLERTON
HRPROFESSIONALNOW.CA ❚ JUNE 2017 ❚ 19
