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Is the physical location of project members an issue in merged companies?

It can be. We recently interviewed the executive director of a merged organization with sites in two different cities - the "homes" of the two pre-merger organizations. She felt that they underestimated the challenges inherent in moving from a single-site organization to one with multiple sites. With multiple sites, you often need to work harder at integrating the staff, and the cultures. There may be more than one "market" to understand post-merger, if the two sites are in different geographic areas. There will likely be a need for the ED (and/or other senior management staff) to be "present" at both sites for some amount of time, and if you try to bring people from both sites together for meetings on any sort of regular basis, there will be an added cost (in both time and money) for each meeting.

These issues can be more or less challenging, depending on how much experience the merging organizations have with multiple-site projects or organizations, and on how far away from each other the sites are. When two or more organizations from the same city or county merge, it is often possible to move staff around to optimize productivity and help with the "getting to know you" process. In one situation we know of, for example, two merging organizations moved all of the administrative staff to one location, while all the staff working with one particular type of program were located at the second location. Other program staff remained dispersed.

However you choose to organize staff post-merger, pay close attention to communication between people, and between sites. If geography makes regular meetings and joint events impossible, invest in other forms of communication - electronic, newsletters, etc. It is possible to work effectively with people in far-flung places - it just takes a little more work.