How do you sustain a safe, secure and consistent service to customers throughout a complex merger programme?
When two UK-based financial services organisations announced their merger, they needed to find a way to maintain ‘business as usual’ for customers throughout the process. Although the two organisations had similar values and complementary strengths, they still needed to create an aligned and integrated organisation with a shared strategy, vision and mission. And they needed to ensure that changes to delivery of products and services would not diminish people’s ability to work effectively.
The CEO saw aligning the culture of the two organisations around the agreed key values as the first aspect to focus on. After this came the need to understand existing strategy, business and operating models, to explore the integration challenges, and to decide how to organise individual areas of business.
TEN LTD provided options for structures and accountabilities; identified areas of surplus headcount; evaluated roles and made reward recommendations; and supported estimation of costs for implementing the new structures. We wrote new job descriptions and trained internal teams to revise job descriptions for junior and support staff.
This helped the merged organisation to ensure it had the internal structures to deliver on its promises to customers while retaining the best people for each role at every level and rewarding them appropriately.
The transition went smoothly, offering an uninterrupted, fully functional customer service, and without triggering any industrial unrest or adverse comment in the press.