How to Retain Employees After a Merger or Acquisition

Big things are happening for your company.

You’re in talks to be acquired by a larger organization that will give your investors their return and give you the runway you need to achieve more of your goals and faster.

As far as you’re concerned, there are big things ahead for you and everyone involved.

Or are there? As talks progress, you start hearing some troubling facts.

Acquired employees exhibit significantly greater rates of turnover than regular hires. In the case of "acqui-hires", over 33% of acquired employees leave post-acquisition.

That’s simply not an option for you.

Your current employees are the main reason for your company’s success, and you can’t meet the next phase of goals without them.

How can you ensure growing your company won’t equal losing your best people?

Understand why employees leave after a merger or acquisition

The best way to start is to put yourself in your employees’ shoes by understanding why they might want to leave after an acquisition.

Organizational mismatch

There are all kinds of reasons why your organization might undergo a merger or an acquisition.

A few common reasons include securing a bigger war chest, achieving greater brand recognition, winning more talent in a specific area such as tech, diversifying the business, and more.

The record breaking merger between Time Warner and AOL took place in 2000 because AOL was in households across the country and Time Warner had a massive entertainment footprint. The merger was meant to be a beautiful marriage between content and distribution.

The merger between Anheuser-Busch InBev and SABMiller was meant to expand famous brands like Budweiser, Corona, and Stella Artois into fast-growing markets in Africa and Latin America.

But just because there’s alignment from a business point of view, doesn’t mean there’ll be alignment from a cultural point of view.

This is a big deal. Culture has been found to be the cause of 30% of failed integrations.

What does this do in real-time?

It makes it difficult for all those “synergies on paper” to happen in practice. Teams can’t work together.

People have a different understanding of what the company’s values are.

Members of “the company previously known as x” do things one way, while members of “the company previously known as y”, do things another way. People don’t wind up rowing in the same direction.

In cases where a company has been acquired by another company, the acquirer’s culture ends up being the dominant culture.

This creates an environment where members of the acquired company feel unheard and like they don’t pull the same weight in the new organization. In this case, employees often want to leave and work elsewhere.

When Amazon acquired Whole Foods, the e-commerce giant’s efficiency-obsessed ethos clashed with the idealistic grocery chain that bucked the status quo and empowered workers.

The result was post-merger reports of Whole Foods employees leaving in droves and crying on the job.

The merger seemed like the perfect match on paper.

Whole Foods would be able to lower its prices and attract more customers, and Amazon would be able to expand its e-commerce empire into groceries and collect more customer data.

Unfortunately, this mismatch between what experts call “tight company cultures” versus “loose company cultures” led to friction.

In tight company cultures, there’s routine, discipline, and strict rules where going outside the norm is frowned upon.

In loose cultures, rules are a suggestion and sharing new ideas is encouraged.

An analysis of more than 4,500 international mergers from 32 countries found that companies with huge loose-tight gaps saw their yearly net income drop anywhere from $200 million to $600 million per year after the acquisition.

Absence of choice

When your employees came to work for you, they made a choice.

They either applied for it (after researching the company or being aware of the brand) or they were recruited and decided to come work for you after learning more about the company.

After a merger or acquisition, your employees are now working for a company they probably had no interest in.

While they may initially be interested in sticking around, if they don’t mesh with the culture, they’ll be eager to regain some autonomy and start working elsewhere.

Moreover, non-founding employees usually aren’t involved in the decision to be acquired or by whom they’ll be acquired.

They may be acquired by a company that expects them to move to a different state to join the acquiring company’s marketing team or research and development team.

They may not want to move or be able to envision their life in that particular place.

And this is only one example. Everything from the acquiring company’s views to business strategy to brand reputation may be out of alignment with what these employees want or the kind of company they wish to work for.

Uncertainties, fears, and doubts

Unsurprisingly, a merger or acquisition brings uncertainty, especially if your employees are from the “acquired” company.

What does this mean for their day-to-day work? Will they have a new boss?

Will the culture be the same?

Will they need to move to a new city?

Will they even have a job anymore?

When they don’t get these answers from their leaders, they’ll start making decisions with incomplete information.

They’ll rely on the rumour mill and trust official communications from their leadership team less and less.

Why salaries change after an acquisition

The combined company inherits two job architectures, two philosophies about pay ranges, and two incentive designs that rarely line up. Leadership has to decide which of these survive, which get retired, and-this matters more-how quickly people move across.

Pace isn't an administrative detail. It's a lever.

Most buyers freeze terms during due diligence and the early integration period, then make adjustments over the following 6 to 18 months as job leveling gets sorted out. The freeze buys time.

But every month it runs, it also builds an expectation of change that has to be paid out eventually.

Harmonizing compensation structures

The two companies usually split reward across base, bonus, equity, and allowances in different proportions, and they weight variable pay differently against risk. Any sensible harmonization compares total reward at target and at threshold, plus job scope, location, and the pay-for-performance slope, before anyone touches a single number.

Here's the choice most integration playbooks skip. Push both sides onto one model quickly and you can dismantle the operating culture the buyer just paid a premium for-especially with a founder-led business built on aggressive variable pay.

Plenty of acquirers deliberately run parallel structures and only converge where there's a case they can defend.

So put each element through a simple test: does aligning it actually advance the combined operating model, or is it consistency for its own sake? Divergent bonus timing or allowance structures that don't distort behavior or internal equity usually cost less trust left alone than "fixed."

Aligning employees with new pay bands and market rates

Map each role into the acquirer's architecture and three populations fall out: below-range, above-range, and those whose pay is sharply out of line with internal peers. That third group is where compression and adjacency problems surface.

It's also the one that erodes trust fastest, because the comparisons are right there in front of people.

Below-range employees move up either immediately or through phased adjustments across one or two review cycles. Phasing controls cost.

But without a committed timeline, in writing, the delay just reads as a broken promise.

Above-range is the harder case. Rather than cut base pay, most companies red-circle: freeze the rate, restrict future increases, or convert the excess into a lump sum or retention award, subject to contract and local law.

Red-circling carries a delayed cost. A frozen rate drifts below market and becomes a quiet resignation risk two or three years out-exactly when the integration story has moved on and nobody's watching.

Track red-circled employees as their own cohort and re-benchmark them on a set schedule.

Re-benchmark whenever the deal changes scope, location, or the skills required. A regional manager who takes on a larger P&L moves into a higher grade for new work; that's not a raise for the same job, and framing it that way protects the band structure.

Restructuring overlapping roles

Duplication clusters in finance, HR, IT, sales, and operations. The combined company cuts roles, merges teams, or redesigns jobs with broader or narrower remits.

These moves shift pay even when someone keeps their seat. A bigger role may justify an increase; being reassigned to a smaller one can change incentive eligibility, target percentages, or someone's long-term growth trajectory without any change to base at all.

Watch for the quiet demotion-title intact, scope hollowed out. Employees notice lost budget, headcount, and decision rights long before HR documents any of it, and the fairness complaints tend to arrive on the same schedule.

What legal and contractual limits apply

Deal structure and jurisdiction set the boundaries. In a share purchase, contracts generally carry over untouched.

In an asset purchase, terms may be renegotiated on transfer-though automatic-transfer regimes often close that door.

The main constraints on changing things unilaterally: TUPE and equivalent transfer-of-undertaking rules across the EU and UK bar detrimental changes made by reason of the transfer; the US WARN Act requires 60 days' notice for qualifying mass layoffs; and collective agreements force bargaining before any material change. Works councils in Germany, France, and the Netherlands can delay or reshape harmonization entirely.

So sequence it properly. Confirm who's covered by contracts, works councils, or unions before you design adjustments. Retrofitting a compliant plan after the announcement is exactly where deals leak cost and credibility.

Using pay to retain critical employees

Uncertainty drives attrition among the people you can least afford to lose-those with scarce skills, key client relationships, or integration knowledge that lives in no system. The standard tools (retention bonuses, transaction awards, new equity grants) only work if you target them with discipline.

Tie payments to a defined stay period or milestone-through a platform migration, say, or 12 months post-close-and ring-fence them explicitly from permanent base decisions, so a temporary award doesn't quietly reset the salary baseline.

The failure mode is retaining the wrong people. Broad, seniority-based pools reward the ones least likely to leave anyway.

Target the genuine flight risks who hold hard-to-replace knowledge, and give receiving managers a vote. They know who actually runs the process versus who just holds the title.

Not every pay change is a statement about how the company values someone. Some close structural gaps. Some reflect a new role. Some are short-term retention plays. Fail to make those distinctions explicit and employees will read every adjustment as a verdict on their worth.

How to communicate pay changes without eroding trust

Unexplained differences trigger fairness concerns faster than the changes themselves. Say what changed, which elements are affected, when it takes effect, and why-including the benchmark logic wherever you're able to share it.

Brief managers first, and prepare them for the question that's coming: "why is my pay different from my colleague's?" Give them answers grounded in role, scope, and range, not vague reassurance. Name a contact for individual cases so people aren't left guessing.

Then measure the reaction, not just the announcement. Pulse checks and a confidential channel surface perceived-fairness problems while there's still time to fix them-well before they turn into regretted attrition you only diagnose in the exit interview.

Use compensation adjustments and retention bonuses to keep key talent

Compensation works best here as a scalpel, not a blanket pay-harmonization project. Put the money behind people whose exit would rupture customer relationships, stall a regulatory filing, wreck a system cutover, or bring daily operations down before the integration finds its footing.

After close, the reflex is to standardize everyone onto one set of paybands as fast as possible. Don't.

Harmonizing the whole population drags every buried inequity into the light at once, torches the integration budget, and rarely reaches the handful of people whose departure would genuinely sting.

Move critical employees toward the new paybands

Map roles from both entities to the acquirer's levels first. Then decide job matches on actual scope rather than title, because acquired-side titles tend to run inflated or deflated against your grading.

Flag the critical people sitting below range minimum, or well under midpoint, for the job they'll really be doing once the deal closes.

A base-pay correction earns its cost when the person's post-deal role expands for real - a bigger team, a wider territory, harder work. Correcting to the level that matches the new scope is defensible.

Topping someone up to buy loyalty in a job that hasn't changed is not.

Reserve permanent base increases for cases where the gap is structural and the person is someone you want for the long haul. A raise is an annuity you can't easily unwind; a stay bonus buys a defined window and then expires.

Blend the two and you muddy both the message and the math.

Tie every adjustment to scope, scarce skills, location, internal equity, and performance, and write down the reasoning. You'll defend these calls again - to works councils, in pay-equity audits, and to the peers who eventually get wind of the numbers.

Model the compression before you sign, not after. Lifting one flight risk routinely leaves their manager and neighboring peers earning less than their own reports, which seeds the next round of demands.

Price the chain reaction, not just the single move.

Use stay bonuses to cover the highest-risk period

A stay bonus should track a specific risk window - a system migration, a site consolidation, a customer novation, the first full operating cycle after close - and end when that risk ends. Open-ended, it's just deferred payroll.

Stage the payout to outlast the milestone the person is protecting, rather than the calendar. A single 12-month cliff engineers a mass exit the week after it pays.

Split the payments and back-load the larger tranche, and people stay invested through the fragile stretch.

Make payment conditional on continued employment plus named, verifiable deliverables. Phrasing like "supporting integration" is unenforceable and breeds disputes; "customer accounts transferred and reconciled by cutover date" holds up.

• Name the covered period: Include the start date, end date, and payment schedule.
• Define eligible service: State how approved leave, role changes, redundancy, or termination without cause affect payment.
• List transition duties: Specify deliverables such as transferring customer accounts, documenting processes, or completing a system cutover.
• Review local requirements: Ask legal and tax teams to check bonus terms, repayment clauses, and employee communications in each jurisdiction.

Size the bonus against the fully loaded cost of losing the person - replacement hiring, ramp time, knowledge that walks out the door, the milestone that slips - not against a tidy round number. For someone who gates the integration or carries a key account, several months of salary is often the cheap option.

Be wary of clawbacks. Repayment-on-resignation clauses are void or badly curtailed across much of Europe and beyond, and even where they hold up they signal distrust and can trigger the very exits you were paying to prevent.

Forward-vesting tranches beat backward-looking recovery.

Net the stay bonus against any equity or change-of-control acceleration the person already pockets at close. Someone who banks a windfall on day one is harder to keep, not easier - your package now has to compete with the freedom that cash just handed them.

Prioritize roles with both high impact and high flight risk

Set the "HiPo" and title filters aside. The people who actually break an integration are often mid-level and invisible on the org chart: the account owner customers ask for by name, the engineer holding the undocumented reconciliation logic, the site supervisor who runs the shift, the compliance lead who knows the regulator personally.

Score candidates on two axes - the business impact of losing them and the odds they leave during the transition - and hold packages for the top-right quadrant. Pressure-test that list against business leaders and workforce data before you commit any budget.

Watch the leading indicators, not just resignation letters: below-market pay, single points of failure, recruiters circling, murky reporting lines, and confidence in leadership sliding at the team level. Refresh the list at set checkpoints after close, because risk moves around as reporting lines and role definitions finally settle.

Confidential engagement surveys pick up the dip in leadership confidence weeks before anyone gives notice - but read them only at team level, and never let people believe a response can be traced back to them, or the signal dies.

Plan how you'll talk to the people you don't select. Who got a retention deal always leaks.

Set the criteria and the manager script ahead of time so the unselected read it as targeted risk management rather than a lottery they lost.

Deliver each offer face to face, and attach the money to a concrete role. People should hear why their pay moved, exactly what the bonus asks of them, and what job they hold once the dust settles.

Cash buys weeks; a believable future is what turns those weeks into staying.

Communicate pay changes fairly and transparently

After a merger, pay changes matter less for the numbers themselves than for the story employees construct in the silence between announcements. They'll compare salaries, incentives, job levels and benefits long before leaders finish any formal review.

The first decision isn't about how you communicate. It's strategic: do you move both companies onto one pay structure, or hold some differences in place for a period?

Employees can live with either, provided you name the choice and the reason. Leave it unexplained and they'll assume favoritism.

Explain how and why pay decisions were made

Spell out what drove each adjustment in plain language: job scope, location, market benchmarks, internal salary bands, legacy incentive plans, or the need to line up similar roles across the combined company.

Walk through the process, not only the result. Employees should know who signed off on the approach, what data shaped it, when changes take effect, and when pay gets looked at again.

Two mechanics cause most of the anxiety, so explain them directly. A "red-circled" salary now sits above the new band and gets frozen rather than cut.

A "green-circled" salary sits below and gets raised over time rather than overnight.

Employees rarely argue with these mechanics once someone explains them. What they resent is stumbling onto the fact that a colleague from the other legacy company earns more for identical work, with no reason given.

Keep confirmed decisions separate from work that's still open. If leaders need 90 days to map roles and salary bands, say so and set a date for the next update instead of asking people to wait indefinitely.

Don't share another employee's compensation or imply everyone with the same title should earn the same. Explain the legitimate factors that can create differences, and show people how to raise a concern.

Address equity and job security directly

A pay freeze, a title change or a revised bonus target reads to employees as a verdict on their role, not just their paycheck. Say plainly whether the decision comes down to performance, role design, cost reduction or pay harmonization.

Left to guess, people default to the most threatening reading.

Get the sequence right. Announcing new pay bands while job security is still unresolved lands as a threat, so where you can, confirm who stays before you confirm what they earn.

Share what the company has examined to reduce unfair outcomes, including differences by gender, race or ethnicity, location, business unit and acquisition origin. Where the analysis turns up gaps, give employees a clear correction process and a timeline.

Be straight about a second-order effect that catches leaders out: harmonizing two structures exposes pay gaps that predate the deal, and you can only close them upward. Decide early whether you'll fix all of them, some, or none, put money behind that choice, and be ready to defend the line to a workforce that can now see it.

Steer clear of blanket promises that no jobs will change. If workforce planning isn't finished, say what leaders know, what they don't, and when employees can expect decisions.

Where roles might be cut or merged, explain the selection criteria, the consultation process, the severance approach and internal mobility options as early as legal and business constraints allow. Silence rarely protects trust.

Check the legal floor before you say anything. Notice obligations like the WARN Act for large layoffs, transfer-of-undertaking protections in some jurisdictions, and mandatory consultation with unions or works councils can all dictate what you may say and when.

Give managers consistent talking points

The thing that goes wrong: a manager gets a compensation question no one briefed them on and fills the silence with a guess. Give them a written FAQ, named escalation contacts, and a run-through of the questions they'll actually get before they sit down with anyone.

• What is changing: Base salary, bonus targets, commission plans, benefits, job levels, or pay review dates.
• Why it is changing: The specific business and pay principles behind the decision.
• When it takes effect: Exact effective dates and any transition period.
• What remains undecided: Open questions, decision owners, and the date of the next update.
• How employees can challenge an error: A documented route through HR or compensation specialists.
• What managers must not do: Guess, make individual promises, disclose another employee's pay, or suggest that silence means a job is safe.

Managers should work from the same core facts but tailor the conversation to each person's situation. Ask them to log the questions they couldn't answer, so HR can update the FAQ and stamp out conflicting messages before they spread.

Mind the edge cases a generic script skips. Employees on retention agreements, sales staff mid-plan-year, expatriates and recent internal hires all have real reasons to ask "does this apply to me?" A manager improvising here creates promises legal can't honor.

Track reactions throughout the integration

Town halls and manager check-ins draw out the confident voices, not the worries people feel least safe raising. After a major pay announcement, run short anonymous pulse surveys to gauge understanding, perceived fairness, confidence in leadership, and intent to stay.

Pull apart two things the survey needs to tell you: whether employees understood the message, and whether they accepted it as fair. A decision explained well can still land as unfair, and that gap is where regretted attrition starts.

Sparkbay lets leaders track the engagement score out of 10 and compare patterns across functions, locations, tenure groups or legacy organizations. Report access maps to the org hierarchy automatically, so each manager sees results only for their own teams.

The legacy-organization comparison matters most in the first year. If one acquired group keeps scoring lower on fairness or confidence, you can act before your strongest people there start taking calls from recruiters.

To protect anonymity, Sparkbay hides results below a configurable response threshold, set to five by default. Leaders can watch for falling engagement or rising flight risk without ever knowing who submitted a response.

Review the findings on a fixed cadence and publish what you're doing about them. Employees don't expect every pay difference to vanish overnight.

They expect clear rules, honest updates, and proof that leaders act on what they hear.

How do you prevent your employees from leaving?

So you’ve got a pretty good idea of why your employees would leave. How do you prevent them from actually leaving?

You can start by doing the following.

Provide sufficient information

Your employees will be grappling with a lot of doubt and uncertainty, especially if most of their news about this acquisition is coming to them through the rumour mill or media speculation.

You can combat this by providing sufficient and clear communication.

If possible, announce your merger as early as possible.

Hearing from the company rather than other sources can demonstrate to employees that they’ll be informed throughout the process rather than given information about big changes at the last minute.

When you announce your merger, announce your reasons for the merger, such as branching into new markets, integrating complementary products and services, acquiring tech talent, or diversifying.

This explanation can help your employees understand what the future direction of your company is, even if they don’t have all the details yet.

Make it clear why your new merger will be advantageous.

If you’re branching into new markets, explain the reasons for this by citing challenges or opportunities that your employees are familiar with.

Make it clear how important this is for the future growth and success of the company and employees’ futures.

Anticipate what the most frequently asked questions are going to be.

If there’s a question you can answer, provide a clear response.

If there’s a question you can’t answer, be straightforward about the fact that you’re still working out the details.

Aim for consistency and transparency, so you don’t have to contradict yourself later.

This will help you maintain your credibility and build trust with your employees, which will be critical to retaining them during and after the merger.

You should expect questions like:

• Will there be layoffs? In which departments? How many?
• Will our compensation change?
• Will our benefits stay the same?
• Will we be asked to move offices? Relocate to another city?
• Who will we have to report to after the merger?
• Will we still be able to work with the same people?

Once the merger is underway, make it clear what the new expectations are for this company.

What is the new business strategy and goals?

Are they being shared clearly with the entire company?

Do you have a plan in place?

Harvard Business Review recommends a five-step strategy that makes a post-M&A company three times more likely to achieve their goals and objectives.

• Prepare a profit and loss statement that goes beyond the cost of the merger and also accounts for the disruption to the organization
• Assess the weaknesses and strengths of your new organization by consulting with leaders and managers within your organization or getting feedback from consultants.
• Consider different options for how the new organization’s processes will work, ideally by merging different approaches from both originating organizations
• Keep an eye on the implementation after the ink is dry to ensure your teams are property supported during the changes
• Keep learning throughout the process and make changes and corrections in real time especially as your employees point out issues and provide feedback

Monitor employee workloads

After your merger, there’s the risk of overworking your employees. If you do undergo layoffs because of redundant departments, your remaining employees may wind up doing more work with fewer people, leading to burnout.

There may also be the need to overcompensate and take on extra assignments out of anxiety about losing their jobs.

Over the long term, it’ll become obvious that your employees are overworked.

For instance, work quality might decrease, absenteeism might go up, the company culture might change, and turnover might increase.

That said, you want to spot these signs before they lead to expensive turnover.

Employee engagement pulse surveys that ask your team members about their level of satisfaction can help you spot issues before they turn into vacancies.

Keep an eye out for how well your employees are meshing with people from the new company. If you’re the acquired company, chances are members of your team will be reporting to brand new people within the acquiring company.

If there’s friction, poor management, or lack of appreciation, this can quickly turn into an employee satisfaction problem that impacts your employee retention.

Solicit and act on feedback

Want to know how your employees are doing post-acquisition? Ask them. Make it clear that they are valued members of your organization, and that you consider them a critical part of meeting your goals.

The best way to do this is by soliciting feedback and then acting on the feedback you receive, so people know you’re serious.

Give your employees a voice. That'll help you sync up with how they’re feeling about the acquisition.

Do your employees view this merger or acquisition as an opportunity for growth and advancement?

Or do they think their days at this company are numbered?

This is an important element to understand quickly.

If you assume the worst, you’ll spend all your time on the defensive rather than capitalizing on your employees’ enthusiasm and getting them excited about your vision of the organization.

If you assume the best, you risk dismissing your employees’ concerns and not addressing them at all, leaving them to take matters into their own hands and continue their career progression elsewhere.

Do your employees feel like the culture of the new organization is aligned with the culture they had before?

If not, what’s the difference?

Have they noticed behaviour that doesn’t align with their values?

If your employees are now working on new teams or with new managers, do they feel respected, valued, or appreciated?

If your senior employees now have to share duties or collaborate with people from the acquiring company, how do they feel about the new dynamic?

Getting an answer to this question gives you the context you need to make changes. Will every problem be solved? Unlikely. But it will help you identify the most pressing matters that need to be fixed and in a timely manner.

Sparkbay's employee engagement software can help you gather and understand this feedback in an efficient way.

Your employees may not feel comfortable sharing all of their concerns in a public town hall or in a face-to-face meeting.

They may, however, feel more comfortable sharing their thoughts in an anonymous survey where they can provide ranked responses (e.g., How much do you agree with the following statement…)

Employee engagement surveys are also scalable.

If you have hundreds of employees, it’s not easy to gather feedback from everyone without technology.

Once you’ve gathered feedback from your employees, act on it. This will be one of the fastest ways to build trust in a post-acquisition environment. Your employees will be paying attention.

Deliver ongoing training and professional development

The nature of your employees’ work will have likely changed following an acquisition.

They may have modified roles or new roles altogether.

Depending on how much information your employees were given before the acquisition, they may feel as if this new work arrangement has been thrust upon them with very little notice and time to prepare.

In this case, it’s important to put resources in place to help your employees thrive in their new roles.

Use your employee engagement surveys to ask your employees how prepared they feel for the work they’re currently doing and whether they need more training.

Once you have this feedback, organize different ways for employees to receive the training they need either through a learning management system or on-site training.

Throughout the process, continue to touch base with your employees through employee pulse surveys in order to gauge how effective this training has been.

There are some employees who will figure out how to navigate a re-organization on their own. It’s important to not leave this to chance though.

For instance, how can you help your star players reframe challenging situations?

Consider the experience of one professional working as an HR Director at Verizon before its merger with Bell Atlantic.

This employee had worked for the company for over a decade when her co-worker was fired and her boss retired.

The big changes within her team and across the company meant that she had to take charge of the entire HR function without getting the accompanying title because she couldn’t move from Baltimore to New York.

While this was frustrating, she decided to reframe how she viewed the situation. She viewed it not as a slight and “more work for the same pay” but as an opportunity to get facetime with senior leaders and to learn as much as possible.

She worked regularly with the president of her business unit, led her team through the stress of navigating the company’s changes, and kept her team focused by reminding them that their work had meaning.

She let them know that they weren’t just gritting their teeth through a merger. They were going to create policies that laid a solid foundation for the future organization.

Her efforts caught the attention of another senior leader who asked her if she was interested in doing work beyond HR which led to a series of bigger assignments and promotions.

This employee knew how to make the best of an uncertain and frustrating situation. But not every employee will have the intuition or work experience to do this.

Plus, they may not have lemons to turn into lemonade. This Verizon employee had the exciting prospect of working with senior leaders who would notice her efforts.

This is why it’s up to organizations to recognize these potential sources of dissatisfaction or feelings of stunted growth and create programs and opportunities for employees.

Develop an effective integration plan

Your post-merger integration plan should consider:

• What new hires you’ll need to make
• How the roles of existing employees will change
• How benefits and compensation will work across the new organization
• How layoffs and severance will be managed
• What the new org chart will look like
• How you’ll merge different technology, systems, and processes
• How you’ll manage HR and employee reviews within this new organization

It’s also important to consider how welcome your employees feel within the new organization. Do they feel like they’re meshing well? Is there friction?

It’s helpful to think of your employees as “new hires” post-acquisition, since they’re technically working for a new company.

In a traditional hiring scenario, the onboarding process can take up to a year, which means you should be checking in on your new employees’ “onboarding” well after the merger is complete.

Sparkbay's employee engagement software can help you ask the right questions to determine whether your employees are at risk of leaving. Implementing Sparkbay during an M&aA can help you undergo a successful organizational transformation. Click here for a demo.