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Integrating an Acquired Business Across a Genuine Culture Divide
Headline result
Integrated within 12 months despite a real culture clash
The challenge
An international bank needed to integrate a newly acquired insurance business into its HR model and the two organisations could hardly have been more different. The acquired business was an entrepreneurial, disruptor-led insurer with a genuinely different risk culture: a young, high-turnover, largely telephone-based and call-centre workforce, worlds apart from the experienced, policy-bound managers the bank's own employee relations model was built around. It had the makings of a real culture clash, not just a systems integration.
My approach
I was responsible for integrating the acquired business into the bank's employee relations and advisory centre model. That model had been built around experienced managers working confidently within established policies and procedures – not the reality of the business we'd just acquired. Rather than force-fitting it into the standard model on day one, we took the time to really understand it, then built a joint plan to manage, educate and support it into that model – backed by extensive on-site learning sessions and workshops designed specifically around the acquired business and the employee relations activity that came with it.
The impact
The acquired business was successfully integrated onto a single HR operating model. It took time, and several honest re-plans along the way informed by data and what we were actually seeing on the ground – but within 12 months it was recognised as a support service that worked, for a population very different from the one the model was originally built for.