Mergers are often promising for both the companies involved. There’s the promise of strategic changes, quick growth, and acquiring greater market share. But there’s also a potential downside to a merger that not many see coming. It’s the workplace culture getting affected by it.
Throughout this entire process and excitement, the business culture part often gets over-looked and only starts to hit after the merger is done. Let’s look at how the company culture in a workplace is affected and how it can be sorted during and after mergers.
- Stress and anxiety:
One major problem that occurs during a merger is widespread stress and anxiety through the organization, affecting the workplace culture. You are suddenly more stressed about everything since you may not have seen this coming. It’s essential to pause, rewind, and take a break.
It could be uncertainty about your job itself. It could be limitations in terms of your roles, salary structure, career growth. It could also be if you have to report to a new boss altogether.
How will you get along with your new manager?
Such stress could profoundly affect your mental health as well as your professional performance. It’s understandable. It’s critical to not over-think and not ponder decisions out of your control during such times.
- Disconnect in ideologies:
During the time of a merger, it’s understandable that adrenaline and excitement will be running high. If you’re a learner, you’ll be keen to understand new tricks of the trade. You’ll also expect automatically for your ideologies to click along with everyone else. However, it may not happen.
For example, if your company has always aspired to be growth-based, but after a merger, it’s now revenue-driven, there’ll be a clash of ideologies.
During such times, it’s essential to have an open mind. It’s also necessary to back your strength but allow your weaknesses to be exposed. This way, you’ll always give yourself a shot at growing and achieving success in your role. It may not always be about doing the easy task, but it’s about doing the right thing that may not be easy but, more often than not, successful.
- Lack of leadership:
During a merger and after it, employees often look for leadership sources that you can cling on to. This happens during an integration since there are so many complexities arising within the system.
If you have a support system to cling on to, it helps to go through the transition smoothly. Organizations must equip their leaders with ideas, skills, and man-management skills to help achieve an overall smooth transition of an employee settling in the merger. This often gets over-looked and remains one big issue during a merger.
In conclusion, it can be derived that a merger can potentially cause a lot of problems within the existing organization. Employees need to be empowered with a combination of right skills, approach, mindset, and more than anything, the strength, and confidence to overcome it easily. A merger may not always yield success, but putting an employee-first approach will greatly assist an organization.