Is email dead? Not even close. It continues to be a common ground for organizations to facilitate communication, make decisions, and in the Microsoft Office world, schedule meetings with one another. The integration of an acquired company’s e-mail is (….usually) standard operating procedure.
Sounds simple enough! However, our experience is that while it is not always simple it is always critical! If you mess up on getting a “smaller” issue such as effective email communications in place on Day 1 between the newly acquired employees and the existing organization, you will create credibility issues, frustration and concerns over how well the acquired company is positioned to successfully manage the larger M&A integration issues.
At Synopsys, we consider email integration complete after the completion of three events:
1) An acquired employee has accepted an offer of employment from Synopsys.
2) The new Synopsys employee is assigned a user name which enables e-mail, calendar, and voice, as well as complete network access.
3) E-mails to the acquired company’s domain are forwarded to the appropriate e-mail on the Synopsys domain.
In October 2012, I was involved with the integration of a privately held French company. Sensitized to the regulatory aspects of such a transaction, the entire team spent significant time developing very detailed integration plans. Special attention was paid to lead times required for notification approvals by the French employee Works Council.
When this particular acquisition closed, a month passed before the acquired company’s French employees received and accepted offers. This window of time had been allocated for Works Council approval, so the resulting integration plan called for all acquired employees to receive a Synopsys e-mail, but they would have network access limitations until their employee status was finalized. Lastly, e-mail forwarding was targeted for a later date pending the termination of a 3rd party’s mail services and the renaming of the acquired entity.
It was a well laid plan. It demonstrated an ability to adjust an existing best practice to comply with cross-border regulation, some means for everyone to communicate with the newly acquired organization, and the outside world could begin associating the acquired employees with Synopsys. We also felt that the limited network access for the period of one month would cause minimal impact on the team’s productivity because their product development focus was well contained.
The deal closed with the requisite press release, flawlessly executed employee communications plan, and a business infrastructure ready to take new orders… except, we found that the yet-to-be-new-employees were unable to ‘use’ their new e-mails because they did not have complete network access, nor could they see their new colleagues’ availability for meetings-- for the same reason. It took some digging to figure out it was really a network access issue. Using the newly created e-mails didn’t result in any error messages because some folks were actually disciplined enough to use two e-mail address domains for some employees. So, the issue didn’t reveal itself in a consistent manner.
In the end, we determined that while it is occasionally necessary and acceptable to adjust integration processes, if at any time some type of change is made to accommodate something such as a regulatory waiting period, the process or flow of information must be completely simulated to ensure that the adjustment has not disrupted the process’ primary goal. Had we simulated how employees accessed their e-mail, determined what e-mail addresses they were going to use, etc. we could have avoided missed communications, meeting requests, and general confusion about who knew what and if what they knew was up to date.
Learning from history: we will be careful not to experience a deju vu of this faux pas!
About the Author
Marilyn Adan heads Synopsys’ M&A Corporate Integration’s Initiatives. A member of the Strategic Business Development team, she oversees all integration activity from an acquisition’s due diligence kick-off through its post-deal analyses.
About Synopsys
Synopsys, Inc. (Nasdaq:SNPS) provides products and services that accelerate innovation in the global electronics market. Synopsys’ comprehensive, integrated portfolio of technical software and IP enable engineers to quickly bring products to market while reducing costs and schedule risk. Headquartered in Mountain View, CA its global presence includes ~80 sales, support and R&D offices and ~8,500 employees worldwide.