Mergers and acquisitions lead to a lot of changes. In this blog post, learn five ways talent management software can help you maintain your performance expectations during M&As.

Mergers and acquisitions have a major impact on your workforce. Your employees will potentially experience changes related to their:

• Healthcare benefits
• Pensions or retirement plans
• Stock options and shares
• Overall company culture

These changes alone are enough to worry or overwhelm employees, but your workers may also fear job losses due to organizational restructuring. These anxieties can negatively impact your workforce productivity during and immediately after M&A activity, but you can take steps to ease employees’ nerves and maintain your performance expectations.

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1) Establish a Baseline

Before you can optimize your workforce after a merger or acquisition, you need to know who your talent is and what skills exist across your organization. M&A activity causes a lot of disruptions for your workforce, so your employees’ current performance data could be misleading. You must establish a baseline for what typical performance metrics look like and ensure you’re making strategic decisions for your organization based on reliable information.

It’s likely that your company isn’t using the same systems as the organization you’re merging with or acquiring. Having different systems can complicate your data collection process. While it’s technically possible to manually cross-reference data from multiple sources, doing so is time-consuming, inefficient, and leaves room for human error. It’s better to leverage robust talent management software that allows you to import metrics from multiple HRISs under a single unified platform.

Having a singular source of truth for your talent data makes it easy to start analyzing metrics. You can:

• Identify areas of your business that lack essential skills
• Discover which teams have an abundance of people performing the same tasks
• Look at employees’ performance histories
• See where workforce changes are heaviest due to M&A activity

With all of your data in one place, you can start making organizational decisions based on your strategic intent.

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2) Understand Turnover and Engagement

If teams or departments have historically low engagement or high turnover rates, a merger or acquisition isn’t likely to improve performance metrics. At least not right away. M&A activity can hurt employee morale, especially if that activity includes a reduction in force. While you need to make strategic business decisions, it’s important to be mindful of morale. Higher turnover rates and lower engagement can indicate a culture problem, and you want your workforce to be engaged so employees can optimize their performance.

Your talent management software can help you track workforce engagement and turnover data over time so you can see whether your organizational culture is improving. If you continue to see low engagement and high turnover rates, then you can implement short- and long-term interventions to improve these metrics.

3) Detect Early Warning Signs

Talent management software isn’t just for performance data. You can send your employees surveys to get feedback regarding their wellbeing and opinions on organizational operations. Employee surveys are a great way to detect early signs of burnout and stress across your company. A handful of negative survey results is to be expected, but if you receive a high volume of negative responses, especially from specific teams or departments, then that’s an indicator that something needs to change. Surveys themselves won’t tell you how to improve, but they’ll show you what’s not working so you can dig deeper and find a way to adjust.

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4) Identify Top Performers, Future Leaders, and Flight Risks

You need to know who your top performers are so you can optimize your workforce during M&A activities. You also need to know how likely it is for those top performers to progress within your organization and become your future leaders. If your organizational structure doesn’t offer room for top talent to grow, you could lose your high-quality workers to competitors. Performance management software can give you insight into your employees’ succession potential so you can foster future leaders and prepare for potential vacancies.

You can couple your talent management software with an org charting tool to create visualizations that include your original and newly acquired teams. This will help you identify where your top performers and flight risks are located throughout your business so you can find (and fill) talent gaps.

5) Prioritize Transparency

It’s problematic to share progress during a merger or acquisition, but being as transparent as possible will help you build trust with employees. If your workforce doesn't trust you, they won’t be as likely to perform to the best of their ability. Take advantage of your talent management software to continue ‘business as usual’ operations like:

• 1:1 meetings between managers and direct reports
• Requesting feedback on performance and skills
• Hosting scheduled all-hands meetings

Maintaining consistent operations and sharing as much information as you can will help to ease workers’ nerves. Encourage employees to ask their managers questions, and ensure your leaders are listening to workers’ concerns. There are bound to be growing pains during M&A activity, but being transparent throughout the process will help ease the transition for everyone.