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Article | People & Risk Coach Reference

What does WTW do in terms of supporting M&A transactions?

March 24, 2022

WTW typically supports companies with project planning and pitfall identification across many of the HR workstreams, critically to those with long lead times and where employee impact and consultation is involved.
Health and Benefits|Mergers and Acquisitions|Employee Experience|Ukupne nagrade |Benessere integrato
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WTW typically supports companies with project planning and pitfall identification across many of the HR workstreams, critically to those with long lead times and where employee impact and consultation is involved. Besides the HR perspective, WTW is also a leading insurance broker with worldwide presence. We have expertise in all risk categories and can help conduct a due diligence on existing policies and the potential need for risk mitigation.

An M&A deal will have many people related challenges, spanning the obvious (executive) compensation and benefits, but also includes cultural assessment, employee engagement, retention of key employees, effective communication, and providing an overall good employee experience. At WTW we analyse these risks during the target evaluation and due diligence phase, whilst supporting organisations in planning for the integration pre and post-close, and executing on the harmonization.

M&A and Risk perspective

  • Conducting a due diligence on the existing policies is important in order to know which risks are covered and which not, any outstanding claims and their importance.
  • Warranty & Indemnity (W&I) insurance to cover financial loss arising from unknown breaches of the seller’s warranties and tax indemnities under the SPA.

M&A from an HR perspective

  1. 01

    Supporting your people managers to be familiar with M&A so they are ready for when a deal happens

    • We publish a quarterly M&A digest of thought leadership and articles around HR M&A issues. Subscribing to this will provide a breadth of insights for you. To subscribe to future editions can be done here.
    • We provide training in our HR M&A Readiness Academy for HR professionals supporting M&A’s or M&A professionals who need to better understand the HR aspects.
    • We organise M&A roundtables in many locations around the world to give you and your colleagues a chance to meet and talk with peers in comparable organisations and share best practices.
  2. 02

    Helping you expand your M&A team when a deal hits

    • We provide contingent resource as needed, ranging from managing or supporting aspects of the HR M&A process, to providing workstream or geography specific support. For many clients we also provide temporary secondment support as they pull HR talent into a deal process requesting WTW provides capacity to pick up the “day job” and allow your people to focus on the transaction. We can easily manage this globally, consolidated under your central oversight if needed.
    • A series of short “M&A podcast” that offer a ‘beginners guide’ to the HR manager who may be pulled into their first deal. The recordings provide an on-demand, bite-sized briefing on the basics of the M&A process.
  3. 03

    Helping you get a deal underway

    • We can act as a sounding board, on a confidential basis, as a new transaction starts to move or as an existing deal grows. We support around 1,000 deals a year. Whilst every transaction is different, we have seen many and varied deal realities and can share our experience with you.
    • As a deal gets traction, we often join our clients for an HR planning session. These sessions focus on mapping out the deal timeline, identifying HR activities, resources and responsibilities along with key interdependencies to other workstreams (legal, employee relations, payroll, technology etc). It also includes the identification of key risk factors and mitigants allowing HR teams to move quickly to manage the processes and proactively addressing key issues.

Contact


Edwin Nys
Director Sales & Client Management Belgium

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