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Integrating the New Organization

Post-Merger Steps to Successful Staff Integration

Integrating staff after a merger is far more of an art than a science. As such, there is no definitive “checklist” for how to get it done. Success depends heavily on awareness of what the staff’s concerns, feelings, and challenges are, and on communication. Positive progress in other, more “technical” integration areas, such as finance, fundraising, programs, and communication materials, can often lead to improved employee morale and a greater sense of teamwork among individuals from different pre-merger organizations. That said, the organization’s leaders can do several things to make staff integration go more smoothly. These are

• Address employee concerns
• Communicate early and often
• Work to align organizational and staff interests
• Clarify new roles
• Engage staff with exercises and experiences
• Celebrate

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

Address employee concerns

To transform a post-merger staff group into a well-functioning work team, the organization’s leadership needs to understand what people are most concerned about. The list is fairly standard:

1. My job
2. My role
3. My title
4. My boss
5. My team
6. My office
7. My compensation
8. My benefits
9. My career
10. My future

Most of these concerns are common to both paid and volunteer staff. The human resources function can help to alleviate many of them through clear policies, job descriptions, and the like. However, the organization’s leadership will need to address the last two concerns in particular, and the integration team has a duty to bring these to the leaders’ attention.

The immediate concern that occurs to most people when they hear of an impending merger is job security. Since most nonprofit mergers result in few, if any, layoffs, this concern can usually be allayed fairly early on by indicating which jobs, if any, will be eliminated. Numbers two through eight are generally dealt with through the human resources function. Tough situations may arise if the changes being made feel less-than-optimal for staff, such as might happen if, for example, certain benefits are to be reduced in a trade-off between health care and retirement. If handled sensitively, preferably through one-on-one meetings with supervisors, these issues can usually be satisfactorily resolved.

Numbers nine and ten may need to be addressed over a longer time frame. Career paths in the nonprofit sector are often circuitous at best. Most organizations are relatively .at, often making a move out necessary in order to move up. One benefit of a merger that can be “sold” to employees is that a larger organization may result in additional career opportunities over time.

The fact that the organization is bigger, and may thus offer more career opportunities, can address number seven, but the real question behind the last concern, “my future,” is whether the employee or volunteer still has a place in the organization. If someone is a marginal performer, the message you may want to send is no. However, you want to help your best employees and volunteers to see a future for themselves in the organization. Many managers are reluctant to be so explicit, but it can be a real boost to morale (and retention) for staff to hear that they are a valued part of the new organization going forward.

Communicate early and often

If you do not keep employees informed and aware of impending changes and transitions, they will make up interpretations of their own, and these will seldom be either accurate or positive. Even when you do a stellar job of keeping people informed—passing along all the latest information from the integration team, posting minutes of important meetings, and so forth—you still have to create mechanisms for clarification and response to questions. As an “insider” to the integration process, what may seem obvious or clear to you may be quite obscure or confusing to a front-line staff member or occasional volunteer. Therefore, you must put in place mechanisms that allow employees to bring their concerns to leadership, ask questions, and question rumors. Interactive, two-way communication with staff is critical, and feedback mechanisms must be both plentiful and effective.

Work to align organizational and staff interests

Organizations often make one of two major mistakes: ignoring the needs, requirements, and perceptions of staff members, or making those same needs, requirements, and perceptions the defining factor in leadership decisions. It is important to balance the needs and concerns of staff, both paid and unpaid, with the needs and requirements of the organization, such as meeting goals and commitments within a balanced budget. You should be able to get a good handle on what your staff think and feel they need. The next question is how those staff-defined concerns stack up against your sense of the organization’s needs. For example, staff may believe very strongly that the great retirement plan offered by the smaller of the pre-merger organizations should be continued and extended to everyone in the new, much larger, merged organization, while you know that doing so would be a budget-buster.

How you identify and address such conflicts will be key to the acceptance of the merger by staff. The first step is to identify them. Through your interactive communications with staff, try to identify their most strongly felt needs. Don’t try to craft a response to any one of these needs on its own. Instead, when you are reasonably certain that you understand all the big issues, list them, and try to quantify their cost. The cost may be as simple as a dollar figure, or it may be more complex, as when combining a generous holiday and sick-leave policy at one organization with a generous vacation policy at the other would lead to an untenably high number of days off per year. Once you have totaled the costs, consider how much, in the aggregate, you can afford to spend addressing these concerns. With this number in mind (total dollars, total days off, total hours for training, whatever it is), you are ready to involve the staff in solving the problem.

The key to resolving these difficult conflicts is to come out of the process with a resolution that is both affordable to the organization and acceptable to the staff. Managers who try to work out a fair solution on their own will find that regardless of its patent fairness, it will be poorly received if staff have not been engaged in struggling with the problem themselves. Let them see your lists and your idea of the constraints, and let them work with you to find a balance. Ultimately the decision will be made by management, but usually this collaborative method produces the best thinking on the issue, and a resolution that is acceptable to the vast majority of staff.

Clarify new roles

Everyone’s role changes in a merger, even if they are doing the same job. The transitions that occur need to be made specific and clear to the impacted employees. Changes to roles are best communicated individually, at least in the early stages of integration. While each person’s role may be quite clear in your mind as a leader of the integration process, it is quite possible that it is less than perfectly clear in the mind of, say, the receptionist, who is wondering how to answer the telephone. (With the new name? Both of the old names? Not at all, as these new folks like calls to route directly to their voice mail?)

Roles change in a few basic ways post-merger:

• Reporting relationships: Each person may have a different overall role in the reporting structure post-merger. Departments may be restructured, and an individual may have a new boss and responsibility for more, fewer, or a different group of supervisees. Middle managers often experience the greatest shift in this area.

• Function: The actual work done by a person may change either slightly or entirely post-merger. A receptionist may become support staff for several managers; a development staffer may take on responsibility for communication.

• Authority: As an organization grows, it is not uncommon for people to be asked to take on additional independent authority. Again, this is particularly true for middle managers. Previously, they may have had regular access to a senior manager for advice and confirmation of decisions. That person may now be too distant, or too busy, for such regular contact.

In each of these areas, it is important to tell the affected employee what to expect in the new organization. Greater independence may be a relief, but not if it is perceived simply as neglect. And nothing makes someone more unhappy and confused at work than either having two bosses or being unclear who the boss is.

Some positions will require more immediate clarification than others — but not by much. The chief financial officer will need to know early on when to provide reports on the new organization, and the shelter managers of two merging homeless organizations will need to know from the outset if they are to act as peers, or if one of them now reports to the other. On the other hand, some positions may be able to “.y below the radar” for quite some time. Staff or volunteers who provide services in an isolated location, or whose job does not normally bring them into contact with other staff or volunteers, may be content to wait as long as possible before adapting their behavior in any way. These people, nonetheless, need to receive as much information about the merger as the receptionist who is asking how to answer the phone. Why? Because they are bound to come in contact with vendors, clients, or personnel from other organizations in the community—and possibly even funders—and you want to be sure that they understand both the reasons for the merger and their role in the new order of things.

Excerpted from The Nonprofit Mergers Workbook Part II: Unifying the Organization after a Merger, by La Piana Associates. Copyright 2004 by La Piana Associates, Inc. Used with permission. For more information on Wilder foundation publications, call 1-800-274-6024. To order the Workbook, go to www.wilder.org/pubs/mergers_part_II/mergers_part_II_info.html