How to Determine Appropriate Performance Measures During Mergers (cont'd)
The purpose of the learning and growth assessment is to evaluate the ability of people and systems to deliver the desired process performance and customer results. While it is unnecessary to wait until the process and customer assessments are completely finished to begin thinking about performance measures for Learning & Growth, a certain amount of pre-work in other areas must precede personnel decisions and establishment of long-term performance measures.
The proper sequencing of decision-making during M & A activity with regard to personnel is as follows:
A common mistake is to view this in reverse. Many companies think about the people in the two merging entities and try to create positions and structure based who they already have on board. This practically guarantees sub-optimal results. Instead of thinking about "What kind of job should we create for Pat?", a company will be better served thinking about skills first. Once it has been determined what the key processes and customer needs will be in the new organization, pull out a blank sheet of paper and draw up what sets of skills would be ideal to deliver the desired results. Next, think through the best organizational structure and job descriptions necessary to position these skills properly. Only then it is appropriate to match the skills of the people to the jobs.
A third transition team should be formed to focus on the people issues. Detailed project plans should be created for the assessment of skills needed, creation of structure, and the matching of personnel to skills / gap identification. This will beget a series of short-term planning-based measures to track the progress of all the activity versus plan. Traditional human resources performance measures such as employee retention, morale, and productivity are bound to show tremendous variation during M & A activity. Monitoring them should be interesting and can be used to supplement the planning-focused measures. (For the reader familiar with control charts: it should be noted that the traditional measures will almost certainly reflect special cause variation at the time of a merger.)
Learning and growth also typically includes communication. It was mentioned during the merger process overview above that communication is critical throughout a merger, so adding corresponding measures to this section is strongly recommended. In addition to a planning-based measure tracking implementation of communication strategy, it is advisable to add measures of communication quality such as employee satisfaction, # briefings held, etc.
The final aspect of learning and growth is technology and how it supports process performance. A technology transition team should be formed and develop a planning based measure to keep track of systems integration. Other measures may include utilization, % access to technology, e-commerce revenue, etc.
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