Acquisition Transition

The company I work for just bought another, smaller company in the same industry, and I will be playing a pretty large role in bringing the “new” employees on board. Now, we’re only talking two dozen employees (the new acquisition is only about a tenth of the size of my company), but so many aspects of this transition are still up in the air and will probably come down to the last minute that I will be very, very busy and frantic over the next couple of weeks. Which is good, I suppose, since busy = money in terms of overtime, and that helps keep Hopper’s six million creditors at bay.

It’s interesting to watch the demeanor of the two dozen employees we’re giving the opportunity to join our company: all negative. Fear, distrust, pessimism, lawyer-ly “gotchas!” when they fine-comb-brush the employment packets, outright belligerence (“what will my pay plan be!” “we might have to work skeleton shifts on holidays?”). Mostly normal, I suppose, having lived through the nightmare of New Management at my long-time place of employment, right around the time I started this blog, having felt many of the same things in spite of myself. In my office, now, I often bring this up and encourage patience and understanding as best as my lowly station can, but, man, is this front of negativity we’re facing such an incredibly draining obstacle.

I have the fortune to work for owners who are very forward-thinking, very much into the self-improvement and motivation game. It has filtered down into management and some of the employees, to greater or lesser extents. I’d estimate the morale here is 70 percent positive, as compared to about 15 percent for that other place I worked (once New Management really got rolling). The prevailing thought around here is that by our acquiring the smaller company, those employees have a great opportunity to make lots of money. We’re going to expand, drum up business, and get that place cranking the way it hasn’t in a long, long time. Complacency, self-serving side scams, and who-knows-what-else probably result in more than a little of that negativity front, unfortunately.

But fortunately for them, that’s all going away. And I recognize and understand that that’s something very easy for me to say, sitting where I’m sitting. But I also sat in their shoes, too, and it stunk.