Any mergers and acquisitions checklist for HR will be complex, no matter how you dice it. Organizations are complex by themselves, and especially complex through organic growth alone.
However, when companies are acquired or merge with other companies, the information management complexity stretches to ad infinitum—there are so many ways things can go wrong and very few technologies to safeguard information in these complex processes.
The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), in its checklist for HR departments, notes that the reporting and drafting of plans is an imperative for successful mergers and acquisitions activity. Here are some of the cold hard facts regarding mergers and acquisitions from an HR perspective, and what can be done to handle each of these challenges.
70-90% of all M&As Fail to Achieve Strategic Objectives
Many firms specializing in the legal aspects of Mergers and Acquisitions won’t tell you this is the case, but the statistic remains true. But most HR professionals do not have pull with the executive team to dissuade them from undergoing the decision. All HR professionals can do is make a mergers and acquisitions checklist for HR purposes.
The bulk of these strategic objectives are rooted in communicative failures and the inability to leverage information appropriately to inform the decision-making process.
For instance, when companies merge or acquire, they have two sets of organizational documents—two sets of organizational documents that contain the scope of the strategic objectives of mergers and acquisitions activity in its entirety. We document information to remember it and use it for future purposes.
If one or both companies within the organization are failing to use software that consolidates and leverages the document process, the merger and acquisition will likely fail.
Although document policies and collaboration are frequently overlooked in the mergers and acquisitions process, they are just as imperative to the success of mergers and acquisitions as any of its fiscal, financial, or strategic counterparts.
To resolve this issue, opting in to a document management system for HR professionals will help. This technology will automate redundant, paper-based processes and create leeway for collaboration across numerous projects between the two adjoining companies.
Leveraging Remote Files: A Key Aspect of Third-Party Services
Contrary to popular opinion in the industry, mergers and acquisitions firms are not the only third-party services that will be needed to ensure successful acquisition. SaaS (Software as a Service) will soon become a definitive requirement, especially for organizations looking to keep costs minimal in the information management process.
Expertise will only take a company in a mergers and acquisitions process so far. That’s why any mergers and acquisitions checklist for HR should involve use of the right technology to navigate the change.
Given the complexity of mergers and acquisitions, it’s important both parties involved understand the technological implications.
With satellite and remote access, known as Enterprise Access in eFileCabinet’s domain, helps organizations manage information at multiple office branches and locations. During mergers and acquisitions activity, using this technology to simplify and facilitate compliance from the buying company toward the subsumed company and downward is useful.
This will ensure that both companies will be able to branch information management efforts between various headquarters until a long-term change, such as sharing office space, is made possible. A solid mergers and acquisitions checklist for HR will entail use of satellite and remote access opportunities for these reasons.
Technology and Intellectual Property Concerns
Any solid mergers and acquisitions checklist for HR will entail at least a small component of technology and intellectual property considerations.
Trying to identify what documents are controlled and for what purposes will serve useful in this capacity, Additionally, once files are melded by both organizations, ensuring and simplifying compliance from a document perspective will prove difficult without compliance-simplifying document management technology.
One of the more granular areas in which this will happen is viewing permissions, and who will serve as the file administrator once satellite and remote access has been enabled? In more cases than not, the buying party will usually serve as the system administrator, and a greater number of information technology programs will be subsumed by the buying party.
Having Technology to Streamline Strategy
The best mergers and acquisitions checklist for HR must discuss how companies will blend their strategies for a mutually beneficial purpose, and this qualifier is inseparable from the use of technology in contemporary business environments.
A discussion regarding hosted services is surely warranted, and who is going to control these services will be just as crucial. When it comes to human resources and mergers, there’s no limit to the amount of confusion and chaos that can be imposed without a clear strategy and methods of getting there.
Both HR departments will be responsible in ensuring a smooth ride from the beginning of the process to its middle, and, ultimately, its end.
Managing Employee Morale
Employee morale can change significantly during a merger, and not always for the better. This is where the more qualitative aspects of a mergers and acquisitions checklist for HR takes center stage.
However, most HR managers are surprised when they learn how technology alone can mitigate the damaged morale, if there’s any at all. The more organized and streamlined existing workflows prove to become, the better.
And the more HR managers leverage what they already know about the technology, the better. Collaboration in a document management system via workflow, for instance, can help the buying company assimilate itself into the smaller company’s way of doing things and vice versa.
What’s more, if two organizations have very different philosophies regarding working from home, the buying company can integrate its technology into overarching HR processes that facilitate an office environment where employees are capable of working from home.
Document management mobile apps and cloud-based solutions have made such possibilities a reality in the digital age. For any company looking to modernize its processes in the mergers and acquisitions world, document management solutions provide the functionality, collaboration, and bandwidth necessary for a fruitful partnership. To learn more about the purpose of a document management system in the HR landscape, visit our HR page.