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The moment an acquisition is announced in a buoyant market like India, competitors get active and talent-poaching begins. The task of retaining talent, therefore, is a challenge for the human resource department of an acquiring company.
Schneider Electric, the global energy management company, has been on an acquiring spree, and the latest in its kitty are companies such as Zicom, Digilink and Luminous – all known brands. “The moment we announce an acquisition, the competitors become aggressive. For us to ring-fence the talent becomes more critical,” Ms Shalini Sarin, India Vice President-Country HR Business Partner-Schneider Electric, said.
However, the company claimed that in India it had a ‘good retention rate of over 95 per cent in the acquisitions.
Recent acquisitions in India by Schneider, along with internal growth, have seen the company's employee strength grow from 7,000 to over 12,000. The most recent buy-out of Luminous, an inverter and battery brand, has added about 3,000 employees.
Ms Karen Ferguson, Executive Vice-President, Global Human Resources, Schneider Electric, who was in the country recently, told Business Line that the company managed to keep employee morale high in India in the wake of the Luminous takeover. “A clear and unambiguous communication between the new management and employees was the key to building trust,” Ms Ferguson said.
The bottom line, she said, is to assess the two different cultures and their nuances, create and evaluate a new structure as well as open various channels of communication with employees.
INTEGRATION ISSUES
One of the biggest challenges in any acquisition is integrating and assimilating human resources, merging various cultures and work attitudes and stitching them together into a single, harmonious organisational culture.
Schneider claims success on this front. “One of our approaches is to try and be conscious of the value of what we're buying in a company. If you don't take care of that value, it's so easy to destroy it during integration. It is, therefore, very important that integration is brought about in a collaborative manner,” Ms Ferguson said.
The human resources challenge becomes greater if both the brands — the acquired and the acquirer — are equally well-known, as in the case of Schneider acquiring Luminous.
“We have taken care to allow the acquired companies to retain their brand identity. This has made it easier for the integrated employees to adapt to a larger, more diverse organisational culture and relate to the ‘Schneider Electric' brand,” she said.
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