M&A employee experience digital demo series

I will be joined by France, who is actually from Canada. So she's a little bit delayed. It's 8:00 in the morning. I know for some of you, that is the same.

But we're relaxed. That's our culture. But she has lots of experience in doing some of these cultural assessments as well. So she will definitely be providing some input together with me throughout this session. So you'll see her popping up on the screen in a little bit as well.

So what we'll we cover today? As I mentioned, this is part of a three-fold session. We're doing a deep dive because we very high level said, well, this is how we can assess. And this is how we can address culture. But we're doing three deep. Dives

One is what we're focusing on today, which is very much, how do you assess culture at the different stages in a transaction? The next session will be next week, where two of our other colleagues will discuss how you can address culture by building that culture roadmap and, actually, taking some of that assessment as well in order to create an effective integration plan. And our last session is around our employee experience platform, which we called Embark, is how you can elevate that and really drive that culture change moving forward. So I hope you've seen all snippets. And you're probably curious, which is why you've joined today.

So many things I will take you through. And we're just going to start with the different settings. We're going to talk to you about how you can diagnose or assess culture during due diligence. That's one step. That's a very early step, which not all companies are yet doing. But more and more are doing that in a more structured way. Then we will talk about the culture mindset assessment, which is much more around leadership and how do we think about leaders. And, of course, we could not have a session like this without talking about broader culture surveys, which are a continuous way of assessing culture within any organization but more importantly as you go through any integration process.

So before we go into these particular sessions, I think it is worthwhile just taking a bit of a step back because, yes, they're tools. But we all have different types of tools. And I assume you all have them in your organization.

But what is it that we're trying to measure? And how are we trying to assess that? So I do want to take a step back and sort of repeat for those of you that have heard this already or maybe clarify in a little bit more detail how we view culture and how that actually applies in an M&A setting.

So what you see here is the way that we at WTW are identifying and are looking at culture. And this is one of my favorite topics to talk about. So I will have to watch the time to make sure that we get to those digital tools as well.

But what is culture? It's not very tangible. But it is very much what's visible is the experiences, the experience that we have in working with our colleagues. It's the experience that we have working with our clients or with our vendors or suppliers. It's in the interactions that we all have. And that's very visible in a culture.

But it comes from somewhere. And that's where there are the different layers of cultures and almost the layers of the onion that you want to peel off as you go and try and assess culture in this particular setting. And I'm actually going to take you to the core at the start, which is the mindset.

That's probably the most invisible part of culture. It's the shared mindset that results in specific behaviors that actually shape the experience in an organization. It is the DNA. It's the why we do the things that we do. It is what do we hold near and dear to us.

I think for any individual, it is also close to our core personal values. I mean, if my personal values would not necessarily align with what WTW is all about, that would be a big mismatch for me personally. Luckily, it's not.

But it's also portrayed in the behaviors and how we work together with each other. And I'm glad France joined in the meantime. I gave a quick introduction already. But that that's part of the behaviors that we have in this organization as well.

We're a multicountry multinational international organization. And that's how we operate. We're used to that. And that also means that we have this level of flexibility towards each other and a sensitivity.

But to take that back to how you define culture and try and project this onto your own organization, you can have that mindset. You can have those behaviors. But you need to have the processes in place to enable that experience.

If your organization is all about innovation and that's really important and that's part of your DNA, if your performance management process or even your quality process isn't comfortable with a certain level of risk, how do you support innovation? Even from a people standpoint, if you really want to empower people because you have a sales focused organization and it's all about empowerment, do you have processes that make people check in constantly and not give them any freedom about decisions that are relevant to do their job effectively? So that's where you think about the different layers that culture has within an organization.

So as you go through the different stages in an M&A process, you want to think about, what is creating this experience? Because very often that's why you're trying to buy a target organization, isn't it? It's to add value.

And that value comes from mostly from the experiences with clients and the growth and the revenue that they're generating. But how are they created internally? And that's where you go and investigate the different levels.

So we have-- well, we wouldn't be a consulting firm if we haven't done a research on this. And we know that that experience piece is really, really important. And even more important, it's the employee experience that's being provided that is really crucial to superior business performance.

So when we go and address culture, we actually take that framework that we use to measure employee experience. And we apply that to how we measure culture through the different stages. And this is a part that we did not address that much in the previous session. But it's really important as you think about peeling off those different layers. And it's what I want to show you here.

The way that we think about the life in an organization and the experience that I have in the culture that I work with, it really is about two things. It's the connection that I build through that strong sense of purpose and through the connection that I build with people and leaders. But it's also about how my contribution is shaped by doing meaningful work and driving for growth but also how am I being recognized for that, not just in cash compensation at my year end but also in terms of my ability to grow and build capability as I move forward.

So if you think about those sort of two sides of connection and contribution, what we've taken from our research-- and this is the model and the framework that we take very seriously in our culture assessment. You're basically looking at 12 different aspects that define the culture and the employee experience within a specific organization. And there's certain essentials at the bottom where people really need to understand what they do-- need to be supported by their line manager, obviously, efficient organization-- really some essentials that you need to get right.

But we also know what drives that high performance in a culture. And that's an environment with inspirational leadership, trust, where personal growth is important, and a drive into market. So if you go and think, again, about applying that to an M&A setting, it's also about, where do you want to mitigate any risks? And where do you want to drive any value? And that's what these 12 elements will actually portray. So I'm just going to pause and then check the chat on the other screen or maybe check in with France if you have anything to add on this as you just joined.

FRANCE DUFRESNE: Not exactly at this point. To me, it also connects with, how is the employee experiencing the culture of the future one at the eye level? So you need to see, do I have a voice? Do I trust senior management?

I would probably add that notion that culture is about how you experience and how you consume a certain culture. And it's so fundamental to think about how any employee, let's say, your acquiring organization will experience the deal and how it's going and the connection you have and how will the employee contribute. So not only is this model based on research and surveying 10 million employees a year-- and we deep dive into this. But it really is true to day to day experience of employees in any type of organization.

YVETTE VERSCHOOR: Absolutely. And I think the one thing that is very important in what you say-- there's no right or wrong in culture. It is how we perceive that. And that also always comes from our own personal experience and context.

That is why when you join a new an organization, you see things differently maybe than someone who's been around 10 or 15 years. And that will be similar when you go through an organization-- through an integration. Apologies. So you want to think about addressing some of those perceptions around the culture as you move forward.

So we're giving you some theory because, again, it is just really important to think about this as the framework as you go through the different stages of the deal. Because if you think about it and even as early on as target assessment but all the way to integration and execution, you get a little bit more information along the way. And if you have that same framework in mind, you can continue to, again, extract another layer and extract another layer.

And if you think about target assessment, even I sometimes have conversations what people say. We don't really look at the culture. But it is a simple search that you can do.

It is a simple search, closed door information. What are the employees saying? Company website-- how are they positioning themselves to clients, customers, to their employees? How are they recruiting themselves? It gives an impression.

When you go to the WTW web page, you have an impression. Does that match with how you're seeing France and me right now? I don't know. But you get a first impression.

And that is really good as a starting point because you can take those 12 concepts and then think about, hmm, do I have an idea of how inclusive this organization is because they talk about it all the time? Or, actually, it's not mentioned everywhere. And they seem very process driven. And everything seems to be about process. So that really is that lens that you put on.

In the due diligence phase, you will have access to key people-- few, not many, mostly a lot of documentation that you have available in the data room. But that documentation is not public knowledge. But it gives you a really good insight.

So that data room, you can really scan that. Be Sherlock Holmes as one of my colleagues always says. And just investigate. And that's the part that I love about this particular part in the process. Investigate.

And everything that you think about, write it down as an assumption. Like I said, there's no right or wrong. But you want to think about the assumptions that you pick up as you go along.

So take that inclusion. Maybe you have an assumption based on the website because they talk about it all the time. But when you go to the data room, actually, you don't find any documents about it anymore. That's odd. That's strange. That's something that you might want to ask a question about because it's also important to your values as a buyer.

So that's the fact that you want to put on and think about whilst, again, knowing that it's not a PhD research. You will not uncover everything. But it's the first snips that you can take.

Going to the culture integration planning, you can go one step further because senior leaders will be informed of the integration or the merger happening. So you can survey and assess leaders about their mindset. How do they perceive themselves? But also, how do they perceive the other organization?

Are there any misperceptions there? Are there any things that you want to clarify as you think about how you're going to communicate and really execute on the integration moving forward? Because when you actually get to the execution part, you have access to all employees.

And you can run your employee culture survey. You get that really good feel because every company has subcultures just as much. But think about those 12 concepts or constructs. If you take those through all the stages, you uncover an extra layer that can either confirm or, well, basically, deny the assumptions that you had in the beginning about this organization. And it will feed your integration process.

And I saw a very quick side eye question on the chat. If you did not see the previous session, we're repeating things here. So you definitely have not missed anything.

It's probably more of a summary than what you're getting here. So no worries. That was not homework for this session, just to be clear. And we'll get to some of the example questions in a bit because it is a digital demo series as is. I just want to pause if there are any other questions that are maybe relevant to pick up. Peter will get, indeed, to their mindset assessment because we want to go through these different bits and pieces as we go on.

So the due diligence part-- a part that I love but a part that's also very easy to overcomplicate. And what can you do? And you'll see some examples here.

But, basically, what you do is you take the 12 concepts and you assess them. And when you think about the type of questions, they are very simple. Is this company more A? Or is this company more B?

And those are the types of questions that you can take further. You can use this just in discussions. I mean, you don't necessarily need to have a rather very detailed survey available. It can be a simple checklist.

How would you describe yourself? You could even go into the data room and just see. What do I see? Do I feel this organization is very much focused on team effort, for example, versus individual performance? What do I see in my performance management approach? Or what do I see in my L&D approach? And how does focus on growth?

So there is a checklist that you can take, which just are these simple 12 questions. We sometimes take that ourselves in a due diligence approach. And I just want to give you one example of something-- and we've created various versions. But this is the most neutral one that we did to give an idea of what that could look like.

And the reason, by the way, I just want to call out, is you want this to be neutral because if you go into the data room as a buyer, you bring your own perceptions into play. And so you will always look at the culture in comparison to yourself. So the use of having a standard simple framework is to take any of that bias away and take that gut feel away from it. So you want it to be as neutral as possible and as standard as possible in order to avoid that.

So like I said, I'm showing you a sample which is a very neutral but gives you a bit of an idea, where we have some of those questions. And these questions are going to come back in my culture mindset assessment as well as in my employee survey, which is the reason I'm calling these out. So we've talked about inclusion. It's creating that environment where everybody's treated equally, people are heard, et cetera.

So what do I observe? I might have already seen that the company website is all about an inclusive environment. Do you actually see that back in the data room and in the conversations how people interact?

Or do I maybe see some information that there are some challenges to, I don't know-- how do you call that in English, like a confidence person, where people do feel they have been discriminated against or treated unfairly? Are there report of that? What am I seeing in the data room that relates to this?

And I can give a personal-- like I said, this is not about an actual PhD level factual rating. I can say, well, I think this organization is actually very-- they felt very inclusive. And there are values differences.

But, yes, what documents do you want to look for? You want to look if they have D&I policies. Do they report on their pay equity? Still maybe look at some outside perspective. Look at every survey result, obviously, but also the value proposition.

Indeed, what do they report on from an inclusion and diversity standpoint? What are their metrics? Do they have certain targets that they're setting for themselves in terms of management team composition, how do they hire, et cetera? Especially if that's something that's relevant for you, then this could be something-- that is something to look for.

So this is a very, very simple way of looking at it. And I picked on this particular example because this is one that we can take forward. But I think before I take it forward, I just want to see and take it into the culture assessment.

I just want to pause and see if there are any questions. Or, France, if you have anything to add because the challenge that I often get is, oh, but why do we need to do this? We have such a short time frame to do the due diligence. Should I really be putting in this effort at this point in time because we do have a good feeling based on the conversations?

FRANCE DUFRESNE: And I just love the questions by the way. They're amazing. I would add, when you do do this, a couple of things happen. First of all, leaders just love talking about their culture. They love telling you stories.

How does this exemplify? Where is it that they find is still a challenge? And we might want to know about this. That also tells us directly, indirectly about their culture of leadership.

All decisions are taken. What's the vibe and dynamic at an executive team, for example? So most of the time, leaders from the target, let's say, or from a merge are very interested.

The question about do we also survey-- should we or do we also survey the acquirer-- as much as we can and as much as they are willing, we want and we should because then you are able to, with something that is very neutral compared to two cultures of different stories, see where do they rally, what do they have in common, and where is it that there might be potential for you to deep dive better.

And you start having a conversation with them as active part of not only a deal, as active part of the future organization in thinking about the culture in their own terms. That prepares them for all of the other steps after. So, Peter, this is an immense and clever question that you're asking.

Sometimes the acquirer will say, oh, no, not this time. I'm more curious about my target. And we'll work with this. But if they're willing to play, that's awesome too. And it's a warranty to what comes next after because you're already start shaping connections and making the right points of references. And you also better understand-- the model is a tool, but how the model can serve the purpose of your next organization.

YVETTE VERSCHOOR: Exactly. And I think that's the perfect segue way to go a little bit more detailed into how we do that mindset of leaders and how do we uncover that. So as I just showed you as well, which was a more extensive checklist, you could have a simpler one. But they tackle the 12 topics.

When assessing the mindset, we also have those paired statements. And, indeed, it's the deal team. You want to have senior leadership involved. And, of course, you can tailor the content slightly to really what is of strategic importance because, I mean, that's the other thing. What is really important in this deal? You want to focus your energy on that. But as France mentioned, it's really the foundation for a deeper dive further on.

Before I show you just very quickly what some of those questions are and what a survey could look like, the interesting part of this is that you can explore differences between buyer and target. So I can do this assessment, really, about how do I perceive myself but also how do I perceive the other. So it's not just having the acquired leaders but, indeed, also the sponsoring. Exactly to your question, having both.

And we actually have a good example of what that might look like if you then have the output. But let me just show you just very high level. I mean, a survey, you can set up in any type of tool. Of course, hello, let's get started.

But you want to ask maybe a couple of those things. Depending on the size of the leadership group, how long have they been? What exactly is that level?

But, ultimately, when you think about the questions-- and this is very much a mobile first experience-- what are we? Are we well networked? Or are people more siloed in our organizations? What do I think? What is the best approach?

Think about it for your own organization. You can probably fill that in. I find us pretty well networked. But sometimes we also work in silos.

Leaders are mentors. Or leaders give orders and expect results. Very interesting in terms of a self-assessment, to be able to check later on with employees But what do we think we are.

What are we focused on? Are we transparent? Do we limit access to strategic decisions only to a select few? Or is everybody involved? What are we?

And there's no option for people to sit on the fence. I think that's also very important. We don't want people to say, well, no, neither. No, we want to force them. Are we more one side? Or are we more the other?

And just a couple of questions. I mean, finish your survey. They can take it literally in two, three minutes. It's as simple as that. You can have just 12 questions. You can do it a little bit more extensive, going up to 24. But the outcome-- that's the fun part of it. And this is an example of what you can see if you do that from both the buyer as well as the target perspective.

So this on the left hand side is the target self-assessment versus how the buyer perceives the target, with the dark purple line being the target and the buyer. And, actually, what you see here is that the buyer has a pretty good idea of the target's culture and how they assess themselves. So this is a good confirmation that what they're seeing is also that self-perceived culture of the actual target.

But if you think about it the other way around and have that bias self-assessment, which is the more fuchsia, pinkish line, versus what the target thinks of the buyer, we see some interesting differences. For example, inclusion-- this is where the buyer thinks they're highly inclusive. But the target actually does not have that impression.

Think about it when you're trying to plan for integration, when you're trying to plan with your integration teams. If the target feels you're not being inclusive, it's a misperception. But that perception exists. It's going to be a lot harder to work together in a very effective way.

Combine that as well with the trust level or, let's say, drive which is on innovation. Those could be key reasons why people might decide to stay or leave the organization after day one. And it could be a reason why you might lose key talent.

So exactly some of these differences are ones that you want to focus on as you think about your culture roadmap and your integration planning approach, whereas you might also want to assess sort of the similarities because I think that's all-- we always think we're different. We always think we're unique. But it's really nice to look at those similarities as well.

And this is where it's valuable to do both. And I think depending on how much access you have, you could consider going a level deeper, France, because you had some experience looking at different management levels recently.

FRANCE DUFRESNE: Yes, so [INAUDIBLE] first day, the trust. So the target believes that there is much more trust in the senior management. And even the buyer believes it themselves. So that's pretty interesting to reveal.

But one of the things that we sometimes see is two organizations self-assess pretty good employees. By the way, they're pretty similar, so resembling the left. But then when you go by levels of employees, you would see very interesting insights. Oh, my God.

Like, for example, the target-- all of the leadership believed that they were strong everywhere. It was a circle. It was not a shape. But the difference with their own employees was that, oh, not really, not as much.

So we immediately saw a disconnect, a very tight executive team, aligning themselves, believing that they were inclusive and all this, talking about this. And the real experience of their employees say, not so. So sometimes you can derive the data and find insights.

And depending on the deal in the organizations, the insights will not be the same. That doesn't really matter. It's what does really count in this deal. And where is it that you see gap? And where is it that you see human capital risk based on what you're about to do as a transaction?

YVETTE VERSCHOOR: Yeah. No, absolutely, absolutely. And that is exactly where I'm hoping you're seeing the different layers because you get more access to more people and more data as you go on. So you can do this before day one. You can do this with your leaders. Ask them three to five minutes of their time. But see what the input could be potentially for all your integration work streams and how they can pick that up.

I'm moving on to the employee culture survey because then this is sort of the next step. Of course, you can't survey employees whilst you're still in the negotiation stage or whilst you're pretty close. So, obviously, this is something that you want to do.

But you have those perception right from leadership. So as France was saying, this is where you can start to overlay. And the one thing that is slightly different here is that we don't have the paired statements here. But we talk about more what is the actual experience.

I believe I see these behaviors. I experience this myself. So this is where leaders might say, yes, we're very inclusive. But, actually, we would see-- employees would ask the question, well, I feel everybody is treated fairly here. And they would say, I disagree. Mismatch.

So, again, I will show you just what that report could look like and what you could do with some of that analyses. Thank God for technology today. And this is like any employee survey, a dashboard that you can do, because that's what we've done, except the difference here is we're focusing very much on those employee experience drivers that could drive value, can help you in your organization, but also those potential risk areas.

Let me just take one example here already that's being called out as an area of focus, which is on drive, which is not just innovation but also managing change. People are actually feeling that senior leadership is not managing this properly and compared to last quarter survey because I think this is one thing that you want to challenge.

The important thing of doing something like this in a structured way is also external benchmarking. Who do you want to be as an organization? Do you want to strive for that high performing level compared with peers, who we know do really well? And, actually, this particular organization is not a great example of how they're managing change. So this almost feels like they haven't listened to our advice on how to address culture and embed that into a culture roadmap. So they need to go back to the drawing board because something is definitely not working well here.

And this is feedback you can give to all managers. I mean, I'm looking at a company overall view. But you could actually make this tailored to all the managers so that not just senior leadership. But also, immediate managers can manage change. And also, immediate managers can focus on what is really important for teams because they are so crucial. They are the supporting environment.

The benchmarks-- I just called that out. Here we see all the 12 capabilities as well as the employee perceptions. And we already see a trend.

This is not the first survey we've run. So we're already three months in post integration. But we can see some differences already compared to an external benchmark but also how we did.

Think about organization. That is really about how efficient are we, how well organized we are. Well, just immediately post day one, it was a mess in this particular organization. But it was a big move up. So a lot of effort was done to prevent any disturbance to processes. Make sure that people are able to stay focused on the job and to actually continue to do what is necessary because, I mean, that's a key pitfall for successful deals, if production and processes and are interrupted and you're just not able to achieve that value.

But it does indicate as well some attention areas-- the growth, which is about my personal growth. What opportunities do I have in this organization? We're actually seeing that people feel less confident about this.

So this could be a key risk for people to stay with the organization because you would hope that any integration would provide them with new opportunities and chances. But if they don't see that necessarily, you could risk losing them, which is definitely something you would want to look into. And that's where the different levels are just so important and really relevant.

And [INAUDIBLE] you can look at different divisions if you're looking at a large part of the organization. But even if you're just purchasing a small start-up, you want to think about the different layers. And I think France is one of those examples, where you have the different levels.

Think about inclusion. Sorry, that's the theme of today. This is actually the opposite example. This is where immediate managers and supervisors are quite positive. But senior leaders, middle management is not so much.

However, when we think about job security, always a pain if you integrate. Jobs are changing. Roles are changing. We see actually that individual contributors are really scared about this. But senior leaders are really confident. So very important to tackle in the communication, very important to tackle in the conversation.

So just very briefly wanted to highlight as well with the anecdotes of what you could pull from that. But I think one of the other things that I just want to highlight-- because this could be something that you share with managers. But what we often discuss with our leadership teams or integration teams, executive teams is really getting that scorecard, again, taking those 12 concepts but really making it red, amber, green. Where are our strengths? Where are our opportunity areas? And how do we score?

And compare that to the benchmarks that are relevant for you in the sector because, ultimately, you want to be competitive, you want to be successful because this allows us to focus on those areas that drive value but also some areas that involve significant risks that you really want to mitigate. But this is also where you can set clear goals and KPIs. And this is where you can say, OK, a year past day one, this is the change that we want to have accomplished. Or we want people to feel more coherent or in a similar way between the two organizations.

And just to explain, I mean, it's a very simplified mockup of the results. But it showcases the message very clearly. What you see as a scorecard is the target by an employee, their culture perception. So great on growth, great on inclusion, collaboration supported. They're challenging with that.

What I plotted in here is how the buyer from their part of the employee survey data-- how employees are feeling. So as a buyer, employees are really positive about this integration. They feel a really strong sense of purpose. But that acquired company is actually not feeling that so much.

So this is a strength that you can leverage with the leaders from the buying organization. Help them maybe buddy with the leaders. Are the leaders of the acquired organization-- are they bought into it? Do they feel that in a similar way? You can shape a plan about this.

But I'm calling out growth because this is for this particular target organization a huge strength. People feel that they have so much opportunity to develop, reach their potential. But it is a weak spot in the buying organization.

This is something you want to preserve. This is not where you want to move the needle to buy a level of the culture. This is where you want to focus on preserving that because that could be a big retention problem if not addressed. So that's where you can just zoom in on the differences and apply that to the actual context and see where you need to put focus. And, France, if you want to add anything.

FRANCE DUFRESNE: I just saw one other question from Peter asking, how can we do this magic 90% survey response? And so, Yvette, I wonder if you would like to start answering this one. And I will conclude with this.

I'm just curious to see how in your case you were able to see this approach with clients because Peter is right. You really want to make sure that the employees will be willing to complete those surveys. And so please start answering non-complete.

YVETTE VERSCHOOR: It's about willingness. So, indeed, they need to see what's in it for them. And, again, this revolves around culture where there's trust so that they feel they can show their voice or they can make their voice heard but also in a confidential way so that there's trust that they can speak up and they are heard and it's really transparent.

So the way that we achieve very often-- because this is not just for the demo that this response rate is quite high. We do get this quite a lot. But it's mostly because the organizations that we work with also put a lot of focus on the communication.

So this is part of your culture roadmap, part of your change management plan. You don't just do a survey and then take it to the board chambers and never talk about it again and then repeat it three months later. No, it's this image that you want to give back and just be acknowledged.

We see a difference here. We do see that growth is really important to people. You value that so much. And we want to make sure that we continue to focus on that because we think you as people are important.

So it's closing that feedback loop very quickly-- so don't wait too long-- very quickly in a transparent way but also equipping immediate managers. It's not just senior leadership that needs to drive any integration and change. It's more sort of the supervisor level that is really important.

And you can build all those manager toolkits that will help them have those conversations with teams. But part of that should really also be, OK, we've heard your feedback. Let's talk about this. What are we going to focus on? What concerns do we actually see? So it is about embedding it really in your change in culture roadmap, which will make it a success and not have it as a standalone exercise to hit a target or a KPI because I did put down set goals and KPIs because it will help you track progress. But that shouldn't be the sole purpose.

FRANCE DUFRESNE: I love this full answer. And I don't know if, Peter, you're still with us. But I would say you're so right that in saying that you will get your engagement of your employees as engaged as you are.

So if you're very serious about this, you'll do many things. You'll say, we want to know. We'll tell you, you say to your managers, please, please tell all of your employees that this is very important. It's a unique occasion to make the first right connection that is about who you are and what are your aspirations as, for example, a target organization.

So to me, it's how serious you want to be with this? And the more serious you are, the more you will be attending to this response rate. The response rate in itself is an indication on the level of risk you have.

So you would rather have the best possible response rates because you get the real full picture. If you don't get it, you need to attend to the results knowing that you're missing a part of the story. And then you have choices. It's either that you leave it like this and you work with it or you say, I really need to find a way to prove to my workforce. Most of the time, it's a talent play, obviously, that we're there together. And so then you can, of course, correct. So it's not always perfect.

The very first time that organization do this, not necessarily go to 90% with some exception. But when they get good at it, they just understand that that connection needs to be well attended to and nurtured. And so thank you so much for explaining how it goes in the organization that you consult with. And, Peter, hopefully you're getting a good answer to this very important question.

YVETTE VERSCHOOR: Well, and I think probably everybody on this call is a convert. So you find culture important probably. Otherwise, you would not join this session on a busy day.

But a question we often get is, how do we get leadership to buy into doing something like this because it costs money and we need time and effort and people are already focused on any restructuring or any integration? Why do we also need to do this? Well, this is about mitigating the risks.

What is the cost of a regrettable attrition? What is the cost when you lose someone and have to regain someone new, not just in the cost of recruitment and onboarding but also loss in productivity? How much does that cost?

So it really is about those people costs associated with managing that properly that are usually the most convincing arguments for any leadership moving forward. And as I said, I mean, ultimately, we're talking about it in an M&A setting. But all organizations do employee type surveys.

So you can fold this into your normal processes. You might have a different process in the initial year or in the initial six months, depending on how you're actually choosing to integrate. But then it's really simple to embed it in the normal processes. And it doesn't become anything extra or anything additional. So it's very easy to embed this in what you're already doing from a people strategy.

Are there any other questions? Think we tackled quite a few on the chat as we went on. So thank you for also putting them on the chat. That's just really helpful for us as we go through that. If any other questions pop up and maybe they were too detailed to put in the chat or, well-- indeed, too detailed or you did not feel that it was too comfortable to share this in a broader group, feel free to reach out to us after this session. And we'll happily answer those and maybe share some expertise.

I think the one thing-- maybe I should have started with that. But I was afraid I would lose you all. There's no silver bullet. There's no magic formula into how to assess or address culture.

If it was, it would be easy. But we're dealing with perceptions. We're dealing with context. We're dealing with people. And we all people are not rational human beings. So in that sense, it is more about, how do you have a framework and something to structure it and to make it a little bit more tangible and easier to discuss and bend and address and measure as you move forward? I think that's probably the one thing.

Another question from Peter before I wrap up smart. Yes, how can you best present it at the end? You really want to present it maybe just as one or two pages because, of course, ultimately, you want it to just be the focus.

So what you could address is key highlights, as in key findings, in terms of these are some of the key findings that I think are relevant as well to look into further or that confirm that this is a good match with us. But also any potential mitigating measures that you already see, because, ultimately, it's going to be handed over maybe to the integration team. And they want to be able to pick that up. So it really is as simple as a few bullet points on one slide that say, well, this is where we see some challenges.

This is where we see nothing because that could also be the case that you're not able to assess something. But it is really important to you. So that is a good handover to the team that's going to be building out that culture roadmap. And that is going to look at addressing it. Because whatever you didn't cover, they can then cover or deep dive further.

So I think that's mostly the part. Keep it simple. It's so easy to over engineer. And, yeah, that's the last thing you want to do. There's no right and wrong. It's just about having a stick in the ground that you can continue to build on.

FRANCE DUFRESNE: I absolutely agree. You want to know about the human capital risk related to the deal. You also can have indication about a potential integrated culture just to complete, maybe, to what we're discussing right now.

I've been sometimes that organization. And that happens when they acquire, for example, a position as big as they are or something like this or that because they are in a growth engine, they really want to express to start moving toward some cultural element that are different because they double in size. They want to be more strategic, whatever it is. And they want to have a better sales culture.

And when they do acquire an organization, that is already that proposal, their culture. That's also sometimes an accelerator of their evolution. So what's very interesting is that sometimes not only can you look into the human capital risk and all the cultures to propose and how can you get the best out of it and where are the zones of vigilance, but also you can say together what we want to move, no matter if we are one of us having this trend there-- but we want to make sure that those two to three or four different dimensions are very much zones of attention for us in growing. And everything we'll do from HR programs, leadership development, employee experience, we'll put a lot of emphasis on those because we believe this is where success is.

So that's interesting to look at this as a deal. But it's also interesting to see that even within a group of deals or deals, organization can very much take that route for what's next to them. Yeah.

YVETTE VERSCHOOR: Exactly. And what is your integration strategy? If there are some of these key elements that you really need to preserve because they are foundational to why you're acquiring this company, then don't ruin that. Focus really on preserving. And think about the right integration strategy in that sense or a transitional period that might take a little bit longer than you would otherwise do, especially if you're a serial acquirer. So those are just some elements to look into.

Well, keep the question coming after the call. We'll be more than happy to address them and help you forward. This was really a deep dive just on the culture assessment piece.

But this is only getting the insights. It is then really, how do I change this into a strategy that drives that change and drives that moving forward, which is what the next session is going to be about on the 10th of May? If you haven't signed up for that, do sign up. Even if you can't attend, you'll receive the materials and the recording. And they will build on what we shared today.

So thank you for sticking with us. I very much appreciate it. And I wish you a lovely rest of the day, afternoon, evening, depending on where you are in the world. Take care. And look forward to seeing you soon. Bye.

FRANCE DUFRESNE: Thank you. Bye, everyone.

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So I'm John Rothera. I'm a director in our Employee Experience Practice, and I spend a lot of time working with clients during M&A, helping them with the integration aspects from a people perspective really, and culture plays a really large part in that. And I'm joined today by David. So David, over to you.

DAVID DEAN: Thanks, John good morning and good afternoon, everyone. My name is David Dean I'm a Managing Director and our M&A Practice. I'm based in North America in Charlotte, and have been doing this work for quite a long time, I'll say that. I'll leave it at that, but both on the consulting side and also as a user and executive in M&A transaction. So this is a really important topic and look forward to discussing with you all.

JOHN ROTHERA: Fantastic. Thanks, David. So just a couple of notes before we get going. We'll present for around 30 minutes today, and then we'll leave 10 to 15 minutes at the end for questions. Do feel free to put your questions into the chat as we're going. If I manage to see them as I'm presenting and we can pick them up, we'll try and get them as we go. But if not, we'll try and get to them at the end, so feel free to pop those in the chat as we go.

So today's session in the second of the series is really looking at some tools and approaches we use to address culture during the transaction. I'm really focused on building up that culture roadmap that you're looking to develop. The first session we did last week was all around the tools and assessments we use to really understand culture at different stages of the transaction across both organizations.

Don't worry if you missed that session. We are going to be sharing a recording of all three sessions after the final session that we do next week, so you'll have access to all of those.

But as I said, today is really about thinking about how we work with companies to take those insights we've had from that culture assessment and the insights you've gleaned from the transaction itself and working through that process, and how you start to build those into a culture roadmap to really drive the priority areas of focus that you're going to need as a result of the deal, and whether that's looking at areas where you might need to drive greater alignment or change in culture or potentially looking at areas that you might need to protect, particularly if you've acquired an organization.

And their culture and strengths are part of the reason that you've acquired them and think about how you might need to protect them through the deal, and how we bring all that together in a culture roadmap.

And then the final session next week is looking at how we elevate that employee experience through the transaction and through that cultural transformation journey using technology.

So we'll focus on three areas today. The first is what we call the high performing employee experience, digital whiteboard, or the HPEX whiteboard. It's a really simple digital tool that we use working with leaders normally to align them around that aspired future state vision for the culture, those priority areas that are going to need focus as you're going through integration.

Well then talk about some really clever AI technology we use to run virtual focus groups, and we use that to really get a deep dive into specific areas to get really rich qualitative insights from really large groups of employees.

And then finally, we'll talk about the culture roadmap. How does this all start to come together to actually form that culture roadmap that's going to guide some of your integration efforts and drive the potential changes that you're looking for as you move from post close through to integration execution.

So if you weren't able to join session, we will send a recording, but just wanted to quickly recap what we covered in terms of assessment in that last session, and we looked at a number of approaches and tools that we use at different stages of the deal as you start to get access to broader populations, and that's everything from a due diligence culture diagnostic through to the culture mindset assessment we're typically doing with senior leaders right through to the broader employee culture survey often post closed typically.

The one bit that we will touch on today is virtual focus groups. Typically again, we're running those post close, but that's really important form of data. We often find to do that deep dive into those areas of interest. So we'll be demoing that tool and showing that to you-- showing that to you today. And like I said, we will be sharing recordings of the session. So all that assessment stuff will be shared as well.

But before we get into the tools, David, I wonder just in terms of how you go about developing a cultural roadmap through a transaction, whether you could share some insights on that.

DAVID DEAN: Sure, John. Yeah, the process typically evolves over the course of the deal lifecycle so as John mentioned, there are a lot of tools we can use initially in the target assessment and due diligence, and we covered some of those last week. There are different initial diagnostic tools that can be used. Those are helpful. They give you an insight into potential red flags or things that would be culture roadblocks that you should be aware of as a buyer, for example.

And then although we'll move into integration planning once a deal is announced and a buyer and seller agree a transaction, you have a little bit more access at least to leaders in the target organization. And that's where you can leverage some other tools that are more robust and give you much greater insights from a leader perspective how culture operates in the target organization. In fact, it can be used both for the target and for the buyer to self-assess.

And we always recommend that because it gives you much richer data at that point. And then the good news is once you're past day one post close, you have much more access to your target and both the leaders-- more comprehensive access to leaders and employees in the target. And that's where a lot of the tools become much more valuable, and you begin to develop insights that are more actionable, allowing you to really refine your culture roadmap and develop your change plan for it, if you feel like you need one.

So John's going to cover a lot of the tools that we use post close in that phase, but think of it as a continual build. You start with small information, a reverse pyramid almost. Start with small information, you keep going down until you have really the basis of everything, and think about all you can do at that point. So John, back to you, I think.

JOHN ROTHERA: Fantastic. Thanks, David. So on that point, on that first tool that we want to talk to you about today is this high tech whiteboard. And like I say, it's a really simple tool. I'll show it to you in a second, but essentially, we use it ideally in a live workshop or as increasingly we all find today in virtual workshops typically with executives.

And really we're using that to facilitate alignment on that aspire vision for the future culture to think about what are those really critical priority areas of the culture that need to be addressed that might need to be aligned or protected as you move through integration planning?

Now, ideally we've got those insights that we've gathered as we've gone through the transaction, and we're feeding those into this. So we're coming to that discussion hopefully with a sense of the culture of both organizations, potential area difference in areas of alignment within that. And we're bringing that into the conversation with executives, and then really facilitating that discussion to look ahead and say, OK, so which are the areas of the culture that we really need to pay attention to?

And as David's talked about-- this is something that can be revisited as further insights become available as you learn more about each other as organizations and coming back and revisiting it and revisiting the roadmap itself. So I'll just show you how the tool works in practice.

And just to say, if you did join the last session, you'll have seen through the due diligence assessment and leadership mindset survey and the surveys we do with employees. It works around the model we have, which looks at four dimensions and 12 factors within that, and looks at culture in terms of the purpose people have at work, so that understanding of the work or inclusion, that inspiration with the organization.

It looks at the work itself, how flexible, how engaged you are in employees. How are they involved in decisions and how adaptive and responsive is the organization to the market, looks at aspects around total rewards, performance, pay, benefits, the culture that drives how career is managed, how growth and capability is managed within the organization, and then also thinks critically about what we'd call support, so relationships with your managers and workers, how collaboration works in the organization, and critically leadership and the trust and transparency that exists there.

So it's that same model that you have seen that will come through our survey data, and then we're really using this as a tool to start to take that data, and just workshop with leaders to get that alignment on the future vision.

So I'll quickly show you the tool. Now I pre-populated this because otherwise I'd have to go through it all, and we don't quite have that time today. But as you can see, it's very simple and these are the factors I was talking about, and really with leaders you're looking to in the room get alignments on where do we think we sit in relation to this cultural aspect?

Is it something that actually when we look across the organizations we're doing really well at this? Or it's good enough? Or is it actually something where we might think this is a real area, it's a potential roadblock or a risk and we need to take some action there?

And the first step is really working through all those 12 areas, and getting alignment in the room of where you think you sit with those which are the areas that are potentially going to need some attention. Once you've done that and worked on that, it's really then moving on to prioritizing those areas.

One of the challenges can often be with a culture assessment. So much gets thrown up, and you've got to really focus down on which is the critical elements. Now again I'll drop some of these titles back in because in the interest of time, I've had to pre-populate them.

But what we do now is you'd see if all these were filled, we'd have had that information on how we think we're currently doing, and where we think we need to be with regards to these cultural aspects, the points of this section of the workshop is then really simply just say, OK, which are critical? Which aspects are important? And which actually we think we less focus at the moment in the context of this transaction.

So it's really a simple drag and drop. It forces you to prioritize because you can only have two up in the critical area, so you might put, let's say, adaptability and involvement in there, and then you'd progressively work through and decide where you want to put your other elements within that aspect.

It wouldn't always necessarily be those critical areas that, say, need improvement. You might be putting some strengths up in that critical box because, yes, it's a strength, but it's a critical strength than it might be under threat as a result of transaction. You really want to actively look at how you're preserving those elements of the culture.

So once we work through that, then we're into-- you get an overview of where we stand both in how we currently doing in terms of the culture at the moment, and which of those critical aspects within the context of this deal that we think we're really going to need to pay attention to. So it's giving that overview and helping to focus and align leadership and focus at attention, and starting to form the basis of where you're likely to be paying attention in terms of the culture roadmap.

Once we work through the tool-- apologies. We then move into a really simple action planning template. And again, this starts to form those initial ideas for the cultural roadmap. So for those critical areas that we think are high priority, high importance to pay attention to, we want to start getting into thinking about what are some of the potential solutions going to be around that.

If we're looking at collaboration, is it how we are incentivizing and rewarding people to behave? What are the leadership behaviors we're looking at? Maybe we're getting into looking at the potential structure of the organization to drive better collaboration.

And what are some of the next steps we'd expect in that? And how quickly do we think we need to move on? Is it in the next one to three months? Is it a longer term play that we're looking at? And often who's involved in that? And so often in a culture you're looking to influence those other areas and workstreams that are going on to bring these insights into the actions and the plans that they're designing.

So it forms and can form the basis for that initial culture roadmap. We use it live in the workshop, or we have it in the background and we're capturing it, and it's a really useful tool to start to build that information.

DAVID DEAN: So next.

JOHN ROTHERA: Yeah, absolutely.

DAVID DEAN: Sorry, to interrupt. I thought that might be a good opportunity to respond to Sean Kyle's question who asked about-- she said she believes the tool requires to first have an assessment of the acquire culture. Is that embedded into the HPEX? And I think it's really embedded in the mindset assessment, but I'll let you.

JOHN ROTHERA: Yeah, it's a really good question itself. So yes, ideally, and if you join the first session, you might see those tools that we use, the mindset survey, the culture survey with employees. Ideally, we want that data and we're bringing a picture of both organizations current culture to the table, and we've got an idea of where is their alignment, where are their differences.

And then we're working with the leaders say, OK, well, if this is where we currently stand, where do we need to get to? Where are we happy that actually between both organizations we're doing really well on these aspects, or where do we think we're going to need to improve it?

In the joint organization, if it's true merger of equals or potentially if it's a dominant player absorption, what are we going to have to look at in terms of the culture within the target that we're requiring? So yes, you want to have brought to this a sense of the current cultures.

That being said, if you just don't have that data, there's not a view of that yet, you can use this tool in a sense to work with leaders of both organizations to try and get a bit of a sense check on, well, how do they think that current state culture is?

So rather than coming without it with the view of where do we want to be, you can start and use this tool to align leaders and at least try and gather their views in a workshop of how do they think they're currently doing on these aspects? And then have a further session where you're putting those two outputs together. So you can pivot and use it like that if you need to. We have done in the past.

So to virtual focus groups now, the second tool we wanted to talk about today. As you'll see and I'm sure you've experienced, you often get critical areas that get thrown up as you're doing this culture work. The kind of red flags or the hot spots where you know there's going to need to be some action taken, and you'll get some good insights from the surveys you've done, from potential insights you've gleaned from just interacting between the two organizations, or information you've looked at in the data room.

But when we come into the cultural roadmap and this is post close when we've got access to all employees is we often want to deep dive into some of those areas, and really get under the skin of them and understand the employee perceptions, what's going on, some ideas with them.

We found these virtual focus groups that we run a really effective way of doing that and used increasingly over the past couple of years with the pandemic as well as a way of actually reaching huge number of employees at the same time. So it's an AI driven technology and tool, it's online. You can be on your mobile or your computer or your tablet, and we can talk to up to 1,000 people and 1,000 employees in a single session.

It's completely anonymous. We can segment, so you can include questions in the focus group up front such as what geography do you sit in, which business you sit in, what functions you sit in? And then we can use that to cut the results as we're going through it at the end to look at any differences.

And I'll play a demo of it next, it essentially-- you choose what questions you want to ask employees, and they respond with free text. And then they're also asked to vote their preferences on the statements that other employees have shared, so which of those statements do they agree with? If you show them two statements, which ones would they most agree with?

And by doing that and some very clever AI and algorithms underneath the tool, it starts to very quickly analyze huge amounts of data and start to show you what are the key themes and topics that are being talked about in responses from employees, what are the sentiments that are most strongly resonating with employees. So where do we see the highest degree of alignment of those statements that most employees are likely to agree with? And so we get a really rich qualitative data set from it.

We've got a lot of predefined templates we can use around specific cultural areas, but equally we very often work with clients to build and tailor and adapt those, and you have the ability to pivot during the session. So if we're getting responses and we want to explore a particular area that we're seeing come through, you can build in questions on the fly as you go to ask and probe more questions around that area and get more feedback from employees.

You can also run polls in the tool as well if you want some of that quantitative data as part of it, and we can run it live typically around 30 to 45 minutes, or we can also set it up as a continuous session. So you could leave it on for a week, and that gives employees a chance to come into the session and do it in their own time if that's preferable.

So I will show you now. We can't actually demo the tool live because you need to be running it and in and have everyone putting in their responses, but what we do have is a video which hopefully brings to life how the tool works, what that experience looks like in some of the analytics. So it's around two and a half minutes, but I'll just play this video for you.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

[END PLAYBACK]

JOHN ROTHERA: So hopefully that gave you a sense of how the tool works. Just to touch on a couple of those analytics you'll have seen, so what you'll get is in the moment live analytics as a moderator as you're running the session, so you'll be able to see the responses that are coming through, and again which do we think are those responses that are most representative of the views of employees?

What are the common topics and themes. So that's the point at which you can decide if you want to ask some follow up questions or dive into an area. Equally you get access to the results platform after the virtual focus group is being run where you can spend your time going through and cutting the data.

And then as I discussed, if you do build demographics in upfront and ask people which function they're sat in or which country, you could also start to be looking at the results again, you can do this live or afterwards, and seeing how do those sentiments and preferences potentially differ across different groups of employees? So that can then again help to inform the specific actions we might want to be taking that we're going to need to weave into that culture roadmap or specific areas of the business that are going to need a certain focus.

So Dave, maybe I know you've used these a lot with clients, and also experience them as we've used the WTW, so just-- I'd love to hear your thoughts on these as well.

DAVID DEAN: Sorry, I was saying this is a really powerful tool, and when we've used it with clients, culture is an obvious place as a starting point and change, but you can we've also used it with clients when we talk about total rewards or, for example, D&I or financial being changes. So it's a really powerful way to get insights, and our clients have really found it as a way to be more directive on how they need to change and adapt their plans going through them.

And from a user perspective having gone through this when WTW has used it for our own purposes, it's actually quite fun. You get to-- you saw that free chat function where you're putting in your ideas, you get to see in real time how others are reacting to your ideas, and you get to the same in relation to theirs. So it's very dynamic, it's fast paced, it's interesting and it's the kind of thing that, again, gives you actionable insights you can work from. So I quite like it and our clients have really, really found it powerful.

JOHN ROTHERA: Thanks, David. So I guess that brings us nicely onto the culture roadmap itself. You've looked at, I suppose, setting that vision, doing some deep dives to really inform the roadmap, but if you could maybe take us through how does this come together, how do you build this roadmap and start to actually drive that transformation or actions that you're looking to take as part of the integration.

DAVID DEAN: Yeah, this is really where you take all the information you've gathered in the previous discussions we've had both about the high pecs whiteboard the virtual focus groups, the leader mindset assessment, all the tools you've had, and other information as well, you synthesize as much as you can to begin to develop a plan or a roadmap based on your understanding of your own culture as an acquire, and your targets culture, and where you have risks, where you have gaps, where you might see opportunities to try to make change for both organizations.

A lot depends on the model of the integration that you're planning on. There's an integration itself or a dominant player absorption, or you can think about trying to create a best of both organizations. But all of those integration strategies require insights and a developed plan to get to where you're going. So it starts with that information.

One of the things I think is so critical and powerful about these tools we've been talking about is it gives you access to the widest range of information possible, from leaders of organizations, to employees of all levels. You can look across geographies, across business functions, you get to have a most comprehensive perspective on all those insights to develop this artifact.

And I think what becomes important when you do that is to remember that this is something that helps you develop a plan that becomes actionable, also allows it and becomes an ongoing discussion. It's not something you just stop at one point.

I think the other thing that's important is realizing how quickly you can do this now with these tools because I come from a time when we used to do these cultural assessments. It would take-- you couldn't do virtual focus groups. It would take weeks and months even to collect data from all the different parts of an organization. Now you're able to do this on an accelerated time frame, which allows you to have much more impact more quickly for your leadership in the organization.

So John, I think if we go to the next page and just talk about driving change a little bit in this. When you think about the culture change itself, you really have to think about this as an organized change management project, and we have a methodology that looks at various change levers that are listed here on the right hand side. Your change plan really needs to have aspects that address each of these levers from leadership, all the way down to people, processes, and systems.

And when you're using these tools to do that, the most powerful thing you can think about is how to develop these action plans coming out of it that could involve a number of ideas. It could be things like joint business planning sessions, it could be things like developing-- product development sessions, it might involve culture roadmap, culture workshops, it could involve setting up work teams and address things around-- go to market strategies or total reward systems, D&I processes, other engagement tools you might have.

There are a lot of different ways of leverage, you want to pull as you go through this. And the culture insights you developed are what gives you those plans to really develop and drive that change.

One of the things that we see as an organization is organizations that don't systematically plan for change tend to overload their organization, and that leads to a lot of breakage or risk, either with departures of key people or lower performance of the business or other risks that you're introducing from overloading the system with change.

So something that really thinks about this comprehensively and holistically and that looks at culture as an important dimension that intertwines all the facets of the organization is a really critical part of the process.

And we always think that you want to drive as much of the change actionably, but have people empowered to do that. And the best way to do that is to have them feel like they provide the insights that are driving that change overall. So I'll pause there, John, and see if there are any questions or if you have anything you want to add to this.

JOHN ROTHERA: No, absolutely resonates, Dave, and I think that whole systems view is critical. There's no obviously one path for what your cultural roadmap is going to look like, and that's why those insights are so important. But really thinking about how that translates where you're trying to drive change in looking across all these different elements to think about what are the levers that you can pull on, I think particularly it raised the importance of how the culture work stream.

If you do have that set up in the M&A, is really working closely with your potential, your change management workstream with all your other HR and people workstreams, and helping to influence any of the actions that they're taking because naturally as you build a cultural roadmap, you're going to be pulling in different areas of the business and different workstreams that have ownership of some of those actions.

So driving that alignment with them is critical, and I absolutely agree to your point. All of this is going to generate change, and we've done a lot of research, and we look at those organizations where employees think they're really good at managing change versus organizations whose employees believe they're not very good at managing change.

When we analyze those groups and we look at the financial performance, there's really clear out-performance of what we would call the change masters across a series of measures of financial metrics. So change management is going to be a critical part of driving the culture transformation.

At the same time, appreciating I think is often a long term journey. So you want to identify those quick wins but culture transformation can take time. So having that ongoing measurement as well to test and check how is it progressing, where might you need to pivot, where might you need to change that approach is really important.

DAVID DEAN: That's a critical point, John. Just to add to that, I think that to make it enduring, you want to be able to leverage these tools on an ongoing basis, but that's what makes it come alive. Culture change is much more than a few values that are posted on your internet site or a few slogans about what a vision say or what we're trying to be, it really is about an ongoing process of assessment, intervention, self-assessment, intervention, and monitoring. So I think that's really a critical aspect.

JOHN ROTHERA: Absolutely. So that wraps us up for today. Really appreciate you joining, and then thanks so, so much for your time. Just as a reminder, we've got the final session on Wednesday, and that's really all about elevating the employee experience using technology through this transaction.

And we will be sharing as I've said a recording of all three of these sessions after we do that final session next week. So you'll have access to the recording for all of those, and the tools we're talking about there. We do have time for some questions. If anyone has some, I think I've seen maybe one come through, but do feel free to post any in the chat, and I'll just have a look now at what's coming through.

So that's a great question come through there in terms of access to employees, and how can you be prepared? You don't get that access often until post closed late in the day to how can we be prepared with day one with actionable culture focused actions? Really good question.

I think we look at you'd start to build your roadmap. Ideally, you're doing that in your kind of integration planning phase, and that's where-- and again, we'll share that recording, but in terms of those culture assessment tools, you're starting. Someone once described it quite well, peeling the layers of an onion. So there are aspects even and target assessment you can start to look at to get an understanding of culture, be it Glassdoor reviews, public reports, the website of the company itself.

As you move into due diligence, we use often a due diligence survey that we either do in the background when we're talking to leaders but looks at the same factors to start to try and build up an understanding of culture at the due diligence phase.

And then as we get access to some senior leaders as we move in up to your close, often looks to a culture mindset survey to understand what are the kind of mindsets and perceptions that leaders have of their own culture, but also of the culture of the acquiring company or the target organization.

So there is data that you can gather and use that to get that initial view of the culture, and you can use that to start to build that initial culture roadmap, so particularly around what might be some red flag areas, and even if you're not in a position necessarily to drive actions in terms of looking at how you're going to structure performance management process at that point or something like that, certainly in maybe the communications, the way you're going to engage and weave that in.

So taking what data you can pre-close and using that to start to inform an initial view of the roadmap is really important. And then as David was talking about as we get post-close, as we get access to a much broader population, we'll start to gather more insight, check back on the roadmap, build out more actions, test if what we initially thought is actually the case, and often there might be that misalignment of leaders' views and the experience that employees are actually living in the organization. So the stuff you can get on with and start doing early and then it's really about building that up.

DAVID DEAN: John, there's a question-- there's another question from Andy, a good question. Do you typically go through this culture process for all deal sizes? And I think I can kind of take a stab at this and have you build on that. But a lot of it, Andy, depends on what the integration model is.

If it's a small deal but you're really trying to integrate two different distinct organizations, then we would recommend that you look at culture. At least understanding from the assessment phase what this looks like. And that might give you a sense of where there are red flags or where you actually need to make some effort to be more deliberate around culture.

If your model of the integration is really an absorption, if you're buying something and just bringing them into your organization, the change effort is more educational, and a lot of it is more about onboarding and orientation. There's a lot of investment that needs to be done in that as well. You can't simply say to somebody, you used to do it this way, but now in your new organization, you have to do it in a new and different way, without expecting there's going to be some resistance and pushback or some need for training and education and onboarding.

So a lot of it is less about deal size and more about the model that you're using, the strategy that you have for integration. So John, I'll let you just see if there's any comment you have to that.

JOHN ROTHERA: No, I absolutely agree. I think sometimes pace of the deal being pragmatic and effective. I think if it's a really quick burn deal. To do a lot post close can be tricky. We'll always want to try and get some assessments of the culture, but that might be more in the background through leadership interviews and what we can see in the data room, and then you accept that actually you're going to have to put more effort in after and do some of that insight gathering post-close.

So I think you do-- that pace the detail is it, and to your point, if you're really absorbing an organization into yours, I think that focus then often can shift and particularly when I've worked with clients if they're acquiring-- I had a client that was acquiring a small organization. They were very large, predominantly for their innovation capabilities in product development.

A big focus for them was understanding the culture of that organization they were acquiring and what they needed to protect, and how the risk that they're going to absorb it into the mothership, and suddenly it's beginning to become more bureaucratic, they're going to slow it down with processes.

So they actually put in people that they called gatekeepers, almost buddies with each function to be a sense check on do we really to put these reporting requirements or these governance requirements in at this stage because actually we think that's going to impact the speed at which this organization operates.

So that shift can become more potentially about why have we bought this company? What are the real strengths in that culture? And how are we potentially going to protect those and accept that it's going to potentially be some difference in their culture and our culture?

DAVID DEAN: And John, there's another really good question from Chantal. What's been your experience in selling that type of approach, the culture roadmap and assessment approach with the deal team or corporate development as an added value activity, positioning it early on in the deal lifecycle?

I'll tackle this to start, and then let you jump on that if that makes sense. So Chantal, one thing in my experience, this is overlooked. I'm an advocate for the importance of cultural integration and cultural understanding and assessment. It's the kind of thing that can really derail integration of two organizations.

Culture influences so many things both from how we interact with each other and how we treat each other, but also compensation, how compensation programs are designed, what you're incentivizing people to do, and other things. And those differences can really be risk factors when you bring the organization together.

Obviously, I think from a corporate development perspective, you never want-- HR doesn't ever want to be the reason a deal doesn't happen, and corporate development is basically focused on making deals happen. So the trick is, how do you get in there early? Using some of these assessment tools early on, using those to demonstrate the value of more systematic and robust culture assessments as you go further in the deal process.

So I think one of the things to offer is that initial culture assessment or diagnostic that we talked about in the first session as a great way as a value add initial start to get a foot in the door helping corporate development understand why this is so critical and what the risks are that can derail a deal downstream.

And there are numerous examples of that throughout history. One of the most famous was when Citi Bank merged with Travelers Insurance, and the CEO of Citibank famously said at the time, I don't worry about culture. It will take care of itself. Three years later, he was out of a job, and 10 years later, Citi and Travelers had broken up because the merger was rightly perceived to not have been-- not have realized its deal objectives and aims. And culture was a huge part of that.

And so I think there are all sorts of examples you can draw on to reinforce why this is important for organizations to be tackling early and really intervening as deliberately as possible. But John, what would you add?

JOHN ROTHERA: I think you've covered it really well, David. I think what I'd say is I see this happening more and more in deals and particularly with what we would call serial acquirers. Those people are doing multiple deals a year, increasingly you see them having this baked in as standard. A, is a workstream, B in due diligence, having a common framework that they're applying, and they're working through with every organization.

We work with a huge serial acquirer and it's absolutely a key part that they want to understand when they're looking into the organizations they're acquiring. So I think the sell is easier than it used to be, but particularly around that focus if we talk to BD in corporate development it's a risk focus, often what could derail the deal, and how you going to drive performance because culture is going to be a critical aspect of that.

It's not often that I see a due diligence report culture being a deal stopper, but it's certainly something that gets a lot of attention, and it's certainly something in integration, which is one of those key factors that we see as derailing integration. I know we've done our-- I think we run an M&A barometer survey, and one of those top factors that comes out of that as is cultural issues as a blocker to integration success.

So as with any BD corporate development sales normally gathering, I think the data, the stats, and the evidence particularly leading on any evidence you've got from past deals where culture really has been of an issue and how that's impacted financial performance and deal goals is really valuable data to bring to that conversation.

So I think hopefully that answer your questions, and thanks, really, really great questions there. I can't see any more coming through, but as always, if you've got questions after and you want to chat about any of this in any projects using, please do feel free to reach out. We'll have both our details, you can see in the recording when that shared.

But again, just a reminder, final session is on Wednesday, next week, looking at that how we elevate the experience through technology, and that's-- we're going to focus a lot on the Embark platform we have here, which is our communication portal for engaging with employees. So do please join that session, and thanks so much again for your time today, and have a wonderful day. Thank you.

So I hope you guys have been enjoying the session so far. If you're attending today, you'll get recordings for all of three of the sessions, so don't worry if you've missed any of them. You can always go back.

So Embark, organizations are using Embark to amplify culture and enhance the employee experience through a transaction. And as you know, when organizations are going through a transaction, it really is a critical time for Smart Communications and really engaging change management.

It's a time when people feel the most uncertain, or curious, or reflective, or just really want to know about the future of the organization. So it's critical that you get this right. And I know that many of you have asked for this session today because you want to see how you could possibly use Embark to engage with your employees and bring them on your journey and create that positive experience.

So just a quick note on how it's going to work today. So we'll present for about 30 minutes. And then we'll leave some time for questions at the end. But please put any questions you have along the way in the chat. And we will try to cover them at the end. But I think we might pick up a few along the way just if they're relevant to specifically what we're looking at. But again, please feel free to interact with us through that functionality.

In terms of who's here today, just two introductions. So I'm Amanda Scott. I'm the Managing Director and the Global Head of M&A Consulting at WTW. I spent a lot of time working with organizations undergoing M&A to really help them think about how best to manage the integration from a people perspective. So Gaby, do you want to introduce yourself as well?

GABY JOYNER: Yes. Hi, everyone. I'm Gaby Joyner. And I head up our employee experience business for WTW across Europe. And like Amanda, I've spent well over 20 years working with organizations through different M&A transactions to support the employee experience.

AMANDA SCOTT: Brilliant. Thank you, Gaby. So when I think about the series and what you've seen so far, these are the different sessions that we've had. And we design these sessions specifically targeted to the areas that you wanted to focus on and see some technology and some innovation.

So again, today is really this third part and really thinking about, how do you use technology? And what are some techniques that you can provide through transactions? And how do we elevate culture for that?

So we're going to do a deep dive into our EX, employee experience platform. As I mentioned, it's called Embark. So when I think about the session today, it really is just these two things. So the first one is around preday one. How do you engage your workforce from news and updates, FAQs, to introducing leadership, as well as hearing from your employees?

And then keeping connected to employees from day one and beyond. So thinking about welcome messages and new company information and integration updates. Maybe you want to do personalized information on total rewards and careers. But it's really about personalizing that experience and delivering really smart, segmented content so employees and leaders have the information that's most important to them easily.

And then the second part of what we'll present today is around the M&A playbook. So we've seen organizations use Embark to capture learnings and develop best practice on transactions to really future-proof deals. So I think we'll have some fun through this. Hopefully it'll be quite engaging. So we'll actually show you the technology today. So without further ado, I will hand it over to Gaby. And she'll bring Embark to life for you.

GABY JOYNER: Wonderful. Thank you, Amanda. And I'm going to talk a fair amount in the next few minutes. And so please, put any questions you have in the chat at any time. And Amanda is going to keep a track of those as we go through.

But just a quick introduction to Embark. So what do we mean when we talk about Embark? Well, in essence, it's a digital communication vehicle that can support ultimately anything to do with people and HR within an organization.

And we have many clients who use it as such as their one stop shop for everything that an employee needs to know about their experience within the organization and their employment. However, it can also be used in many more specific ways, for example, to support with delivering a total reward experience within the organization to really help employees with understanding the value of the total rewards that the organization provides for them.

It can be used to support an employee around well-being, so helping to educate and engage employees with their well-being, and again, everything that the organization provides to support the employees' well-being within the organization, and provide easy access to the tools and resources that are available to them.

It can be used to support career and career navigation within an organization. So very multifaceted as a digital communication vehicle. But what we're here to talk about today is how it can be used as an invaluable communication and engagement tool through any type of transaction, whether an acquisition, whether a merger, whether a divestment, or whether a spin, and provide that place where employees, leaders, and managers can go to access everything they need to know about that transaction.

So how does it do that? Well, Embark connects people to the right information at the right time. It can be viewed on any device, so it's totally device-agnostic. It's highly engaging, highly intuitive. It can be branded to reflect your organization and be totally color-coded and brand and logo to be totally personalized to your organization.

And as I said, it really can serve as that one place where all employees can go to get the information they need about what is happening and what does this mean for them. And it can do that from preclose, so through preclose integration planning following announcement. It can be that instant platform, that instant place where people can go to understand what's going on, understand what's being worked on.

It can be the place where you post integration updates that employees can access at any time. It can then support your day one messaging. So as you get to close, it can support that day one messaging and so on and so forth.

And I think the last thing to say is that you can also personalize it. So often we see in organizations the need to provide different content to different stakeholder groups. And the ability to use data through the Embark digital platform can enable you to segment that messaging as you need to.

So let's talk a little bit more about what that looks like. And I started along this track a little bit already in terms of-- from preclose, through to day one, through to postmerger or postacquisition integration. This platform can evolve with you on that journey. The content can be updated. The experience can be updated as more is known and as the transaction progresses.

And so as I said, often we see this being used in a transaction scenario as a primarily just all employee-facing communication vehicle. But as said, sometimes, particularly as you get to announcement and beyond, there are messages that you want to be able to provide to managers, toolkits, for example, supporting materials on how they manage their employees through potential uncertainty.

And if you want to, you can add that level of segmentation so that only managers can see that information or managers and leaders can see that information. And employees don't get to see that information. So really useful all the way through that journey.

So let's take a look, shall we? And I'm going to flick to an actual website here. So apologies if I have to log in again. I've been trying to keep the websites open. But let's see how it goes. OK. We're getting there. Here we are. Look, perfect. Can everyone still see my screen?

AMANDA SCOTT: Yes.

GABY JOYNER: OK. So let's imagine that we're in that preclose stage, that integration planning phase, where the deal has been announced. There's lots of questions being asked. Employees are really desperate for information about what's happening. Is this a merger of equals? Is this an acquisition? What do we want to know about the organization that we're combining with? And so on and so forth.

So as you can see on this slide-- and again, this is very much a mock-up, so none of this is to a specific deal. But this is to give you an idea of how the site could be used. You could start with a little bit of an overview of what the merger, let's say, is all about. So this is a highly complementary strategic combination.

So you can get some of those key messages across straight away about why the organizations are going down this route, why they're coming together. You could even start to put in details about some of the key integration team members in order to bring that to life for people and make it feel real and accessible.

You can provide some company information about the organization that you're combining with. Or let's just go back to the first page. You can talk a little bit more about how we're going to bring the organization together. You can provide some immediate information about the integration roadmap. You can answer some FAQs. And you can either get to those there, or you can get to those up here.

So instantly, an immediate way to provide employees with that information that they need. As I mentioned earlier, you can integrate a survey into the platform. So you can get regular input from employees about how they're feeling, what do they want to know? What's working? What's not working?

You can post integration updates in order to keep employees informed in more detail on what's going on. So hopefully this is giving you a flavor of how you could use this through that integration planning phase to really support employees and bring the transaction to life for them.

Now, let's go and think about day one. So we're getting to day one. And sorry, as I said, this is a mock-up, so you're seeing lots of Latin text. But when you get to day one, you really want to get across some of those key messages about what this new organization means and why you might be better together.

So it gives you an opportunity to update the site as you get to day one and change some of that messaging because it's real and it's happening now. Again, you can provide updates on the integration roadmap, what's coming up? What can people expect? What kind of meetings can people access in order to make sure that they're staying informed as the integration progresses? And so on and so forth.

So again, a great way of updating and evolving the site as the integration progresses. You might even want to start to use and complete some of these tabs down the bottom to enable people to access information that they need to access as appropriate.

And then let's think about what we might be able to do with this site, how we might be able to evolve this site as we get into the postmerger stage. So day one is gone. Things are really starting to happen. Things are integrating. We need to get across different type of information now. We need to give people leadership updates. We need to give people information on what the new organization structure might be.

We need to keep evolving that integration plan and maybe that technology integration plan that often seems to be the bugbear in many, many deals. And at the same time, we want to start to be able to give people information on what this means for them from a total reward perspective or a benefits perspective. So again, the site can evolve, as you can see here, to start to go into more detail on those particular aspects.

As you see here, you might want to start to give people information about new or expanded or improved benefits and leave policies within the organization. You might be making some changes to workspaces that you want to communicate.

And then again, you've got the ability to access all sorts of different tools and resources and put content behind these as that content becomes available, as those changes start to take place, as you want to update employees on what is changing.

So again, hopefully this is giving you a sense about how the site can evolve over time at different stages of the deal in order to support your communication and your engagement of your critical talent. As we know, people are the most important part of a deal. And hopefully this enables you to connect with them in a way that feels meaningful and helpful to them through those periods of uncertainty.

So hopefully that gives you a flavor without going into too much detail on a mock-up site. And I don't know if there are any questions coming through, Amanda, on this particular site.

AMANDA SCOTT: Yes, we've got two great questions. So we have a question around language capabilities. Can we lay it out in a consistent format globally but each individual sees content and menus in their home language? So that's the question. I think maybe also building out, if people are in different parts of businesses, can you tailor the content? How much can you tailor the content? Maybe let's expand the question.

GABY JOYNER: Great question. So yes, we have languages. And we can build in additional languages where necessary. But the site already has, I think, 11 standard languages on it. So absolutely, we can communicate in different languages.

Yes, we would absolutely recommend that the site is a consistent approach, structured look and feel, regardless of where you're coming from and which country you're in. And yes, we can segment by country. So we can use data.

As long as we can get the data on the different markets and who sits in those different markets, we can use that data to segment the information and the communication accordingly so that the information that an individual sitting in Switzerland, for example, might see when they enter the site is entirely relevant to them in Switzerland. You can.

To the point on how far can you go with that segmentation, you can go to an employee level. But I would say that at least in the early stages of a deal and probably immediately postclose, having that level of data in a seamless way to be able to segment straight away at an employee level is probably going to be difficult.

But it's definitely something that as you progress into postmerger or postacquisition harmonization, absolutely. Once we've got that data, we can segment to an employee level. So then an employee would come into the site and everything that they would see within that site would be relevant to them.

So generally, what we see is people starting much more at that country level. Sometimes we see segmentation by manager or leader population versus broader employee population. And then over time, we absolutely have seen organizations evolve the site into being employee-specific. Does that answer the question?

AMANDA SCOTT: Yes, I think so.

GABY JOYNER: OK, brilliant. Any other questions we want to pick up?

AMANDA SCOTT: We have three more. Do you want me to keep going? I think this is actually a good time for some of these, so maybe let's go for it. So how is access granted for the acquired employees in cases where they're not on the systems yet?

GABY JOYNER: So in that postclose-- sorry, preclose situation where employees aren't on the system and potentially you might find for a period postclose whilst that technology integration is happening, what we tend to find is that we would have either an open site where you can only access it if you have the URL. And so you would communicate that URL to the employees in the organization being acquired.

And if you wanted to make it really secure, we could add a password so that it would be necessary for people to log on to get into that site. But generally, we find that organizations don't necessarily require that. And they just require people to have that URL.

Once they are on systems where we can control access, then it's through an SSO link. So as soon as we have that data and we can put that link in, then people access it immediately through the company systems.

AMANDA SCOTT: Brilliant. And I'm going to go to the question asking, so who typically maintains the site?

GABY JOYNER: And that varies. So I would say that often it would be a combination. So where we are supporting an organization with not necessarily just communication but we're supporting an organization and working with them across a breadth of topics within a transaction scenario, it's often a partnership.

So we would work very closely with the internal integration teams to help them update that content. Sometimes it falls entirely on us as partners in the deal to make sure that this site is maintained. Sometimes organizations take it on board entirely themselves.

And if they have internal communication resources who are available and are supporting and dedicated to the transaction, then they can absolutely update it themselves. We have a really easy content management system that we can train our clients to use. And so that means that anyone within your internal teams could keep that content updated.

AMANDA SCOTT: Brilliant. And then the next one is two pieces of a question. So the first is, how do you gauge the right amount of information provided? So pull versus push and frequency. Actually, I'll let you do that one first.

GABY JOYNER: I think it varies. And some of those variables are dependent on how long a period you've got sometimes between announcement and close, and then how quickly things are going to move once you get to day one and beyond.

I would say that if you've got a very-- or if you end up having a rather long period between announcement and close, it's really important to keep those communications flowing. But you don't want to overwhelm because what you find is you often don't have very much new to say on a regular basis.

But that means you shouldn't not-- you should keep updating the site, even if it's to say, look, we've continued working. These are the things we're working through. There isn't much more detail to provide at this moment in time because we're going through X, Y, or Z. We are absolutely committed to keeping you updated as and when things start to develop and start to move.

I think not updating it on a regular basis, we often then start to see a bit of a vacuum of communication and rumors. And all sorts of incorrect messages start to seep out into the organization.

So I would say generally though, if you haven't got too long a period between announcement and close and then things are moving quite quickly postclose, to a certain extent, the more information, the better because people are craving information. They're craving any level of understanding about what this might mean for them.

The note of caution as ever with any communication through an integration or a transaction scenario is don't commit to too many specific dates. In fact, don't commit to any specific dates because things move, as we all know, in transactions.

So give broad milestones. Milestones are really important to people. So keeping those milestones updated, providing those progress updates to people are really important. So I would say as much information as you can share is often the best approach.

AMANDA SCOTT: Brilliant. And another question was around, are there measurements of efficiency embedded in the tool? And maybe adding to that would be just talking a little bit about, how do you tell where people are going into the site? And how can you use that insight?

GABY JOYNER: Yeah. So the point about efficiency, I mean, I think it's slightly difficult to measure because what we do know is that providing these sites does enable people to get to the information, to get to the systems, to get to the actions that they need to take very, very quickly and very, very seamlessly versus having to look around, dig around on the intranet, try and remember what they've been sent in an email.

The ability to go to a site where they know the URL, they've saved it in their favorites, and they know that everything that they need to know and do is on that site does drive efficiency, . But it's a difficult metric to measure.

I think in terms of the analytics that we can do on the platform, absolutely. We can see how many people are going in. And we can see what pages they're clicking through to most frequently. You start to get pretty good insight into what people are most interested in. And obviously also enabling people to access the ability to ask questions through the tool and us posting regular questions and answers drives usage of the system as well.

AMANDA SCOTT: Brilliant. Perfect. Should we head over--

GABY JOYNER: We move on.

AMANDA SCOTT: --to the playbook? Yeah, that's wonderful.

GABY JOYNER: Absolutely. So moving on to the playbook. As Amanda mentioned at the beginning of the session today, the other way that we use Embark to support transactions is with our digital M&A playbook.

So this is very much focused on supporting those-- I was going to say integration teams, or M&A teams, or even if an M&A team doesn't exist, those who get involved in M&A within an organization to support that transaction in as efficient and effective way as possible.

And how does it do that? Well, it really does that by enabling, again, really quick access to best practice approaches and tools. It is, again, highly engaging, highly intuitive, and easy to navigate. So that speed to those tools is very fast and seamless.

And I think the next two points on this slide are very important, which is around driving that consistency and driving that effectiveness by everyone working off the same hymn sheet as such and the same guidance and the same processes and the same approach.

But I think second to that is often we find that you've got new team members joining maybe those who don't have much experience in M&A before. And the M&A playbook really helps by giving them that all singing, all dancing guidebook to how the organization does M&A.

So it really supports that quick and effective onboarding and upskilling of those new team members. And then finally, as we were just talking about in terms of the ease and ability to update the content and update the materials on a regular basis, so the content management system makes it so easy to evolve and supplement with new tools, new resources, new lessons learned, new ways of doing things.

And so this is very much a live document that organizations use as they become more and more experienced in doing deals, the playbook becomes even more useful to them. So the ease of updating is really important.

So again, I'm going to bring this to life for you and click into the real site. So give me two seconds whilst I get on to that. I have a nasty feeling it's going to have logged me out. But let's see. Ooh, it hasn't. How nice.

AMANDA SCOTT: It worked. Well done.

GABY JOYNER: This is, as you can see, what we call our generic M&A playbook. So this is the WTW way of doing mergers and acquisitions. And as you can see, again, instantly you dive into this, you've got your typical M&A project deal phases.

Now, some organizations use different terms for this. But these are broadly applicable as far as I can tell in any deal. And then what we also see is that generally there are some fairly consistent areas of focus that organizations look at and need to pay attention to in any transaction scenarios.

And again, these are called different things in different organizations at times. But broadly speaking, the change management communication, project management, and so on and so forth are the key areas of focus for most organizations in any deal.

Now, within this particular version, so this is, as I said, our core version. So this is not tailored to a client. This is the WTW guide. You can access the content in lots of different ways. And so this really helps because people come at content in different ways. And so the fact that you can get at the content in multiple different ways is helpful.

So as I just went through, you can get at it through the deal phases, or you can get at it through the topic areas. You can also access it by the left-hand side. And so let's say you wanted to go into Target Assessment.

And what do I need to do at target assessment phase? Well, it gives you a little bit of an overview. It gives you the key objectives of what you're looking to do and achieve in the targeted assessment phase. And then it goes into the SME project area So let's just click into project management in this example.

And you'll see here that it gives you the key activities that you should be focused on through that target assessment phase. And it gives you a checklist that you should be thinking about at that moment in time.

Now let's go back. And let's look at a different phase, shall we? Let's go to integration planning and closing activities. So in here again, you can see there's lots of information, helpful information in terms of what you're really trying to achieve in this phase.

And then again, it takes you into the different areas that you might want to focus on. So why don't we go into total rewards here, for example. And again, you've got the key activities. So these are some of the-- when we say good, these are some of the basic things you really do need to be paying attention to if you're doing a really good job. And then when you're doing an excellent job, you'll be looking at all of these aspects as well.

You can also see that it brings up some tools and resources potentially that might be helpful to you. So your playbook summary, your side by side comparisons from a total perspective. So it gives you access to those tools and resources. And then again, you've got your checklist here.

Now let's think about how we access a different way. Let's access by topic. So I'm an SME coming into this website. And all I'm really interested in because I'm being tasked with this is the talent, identification and retention, let's say.

So I'm going to go into this as the SME area. Again, a quick overview of what we're looking at in this particular topic area. And then you've got some key deliverables. So what are the things you're going to be expected to deliver on? Some of the roles and responsibilities, interdependencies, key learnings, and then potentially key contacts.

So that's really helpful. But then it goes into more detail because what I need to be paying attention to from a talent identification and retention perspective at the different deal phases is different.

So I might want to go into this from a due diligence perspective. What do I need to be doing? And you'll see familiar content here in that we again go through the key activities that you should be paying attention to from a talent identification and retention perspective. So I've talked a lot. Hopefully this is giving you a flavor of all the great content that is available within this playbook.

And then lastly, obviously very importantly, tools and resources. So where would I find things that are going to be helpful to me in terms of the different tools I might need to use, different documents that might be helpful to me as I go through the different deal phases.

And as you can see in the document library here, we've got some due diligence documents that are helpful. We've got some that support organization design and staffing and selection. And then we've got lots of materials that sit within the project management office, total rewards, and then some other aspects.

So lots and lots of resources within this playbook, very easy to access, whether by deal phase or by deal topic. So hopefully, that's given you a flavor for how the M&A playbook can come to life within your organization.

Now, as I said, this is the WTW M&A playbook. But what we tend to do is tailor this playbook to client-specific scenarios because every organization does things slightly differently. They have their own bespoke tools and resources. They might want to put in their own particular contacts.

And so some organizations access this and just use this playbook as their guide. But many organizations choose to take this as the base version and then tailor it to work for their organization.

So I'm going to flip back very quickly to the presentation now. I'm very conscious of time. And we're just going to whiz through. I thought it would be helpful to whiz through a few case studies. But before I dive into those, Amanda, are there any key questions that have come up that we ought to cover off?

JOE: Hi, Gaby. It's Joe. Amanda has frozen. We're a bit stuck. There was a question that was asking. Is there a specific-- is there a specific architecture behind the tool that enables these various views?

GABY JOYNER: It's just the architecture we've built. And so when we were building this, we were just very conscious that depending on where you were coming from, whether you're abroad integration leader or you're an SME who's responsible for a particular topic within the M&A, you might want to access this in different ways.

So we just built that architecture to be as easy and as intuitive for anyone coming into the tool as possible. So that's just the structure and the way that we've built this particular tool.

JOE: Fabulous. Thank you. Cool carry on. More questions are coming in.

GABY JOYNER: Well, why don't I whiz through the case studies, and then we can come back to some of the questions? So firstly, just thinking about Embark. So let's rewind to the first version of Embark we saw, which was very much the integration site.

We have very much worked with this global biotechnology organization with over 10,000 people and a lot of locations worldwide to support a recent merger that they were going through. And they have used the EMBARK site very much as a postclose integration site and very much used it to support their harmonization activities and in particular their harmonization activities around their benefit changes.

And setting up this site has really enabled them to seamlessly, quickly, and easily communicate the changes to benefits, the changes to the benefit philosophy for the new organization, to all employees impacted by these changes.

And not only have they been able to give that overview of the changes and reinforce why these changes are taking place, but through this being very much a digital site, they've been able to give in-depth descriptions of each of the benefits.

They've been able to make it clear to employees what they need to do. So those calls to action. And of course, they've also been able to provide further support and resources and links to other useful sites where necessary and, of course, those all important FAQs.

Now, this site wasn't used in isolation. It was obviously supported by other communications that were put in place to support these changes. But this was the one place through all of those other communications that employees were sent in order to understand what this meant for them, what their new benefits looked like, and to be able to get answers to those frequently asked questions, which were updated and continue to be updated on a regular basis.

I think the other thing that we should note from this is that they are-- as they've gone through this process, they are intending to evolve the site again actually to a business as usual site. So they're going to shift it from being a change-focused site as a result of the merger into an ongoing business as usual benefit communication site for employees.

So hopefully that makes sense as a case study that brings together the-- brings the integration site to life. I thought it would be useful also just to share a quick case study on the HR M&A playbook. With this particular client, a very large global organization with over 100,000 employees, we work with them very closely to build their digital M&A playbook.

So using a lot of the base content that you would have seen in the generic site that I showed you, we tailored that. We amended that for this particular client. They used slightly different terminology and deal phases. I think they call them toll gates.

So that was all updated on the site to be very, very relevant to them. They obviously had some specific tools and resources that they used. Aspects of how they run their actual transactions were slightly different sometimes to some of our core materials. And so all of that content was evolved and updated to be relevant to this particular organization.

So you can see here, obviously we updated key contacts to be people within their organization. At times, we use just roles rather than actual names in case those people moved on and different people came into those roles so that they could then look them up within the organization directory. But again, the site followed a very similar navigation. But all of the content was tailored to be specific to this particular organization.

So I think that brings us really to the end of what we wanted to share in terms of content and the examples that we wanted to share with you. Hopefully it's given you a good flavor of the way that a digital communication site can be used both to support actual transaction activity and communication for employees, leaders, managers, HR, but also how our M&A playbook can come to life within a client organization, within your organizations. So I'm going to hand back to you, Amanda, at this point.

AMANDA SCOTT: Perfect. Well, luckily, my technology is working. We had just a couple questions come through that I think it would be great if we could quickly touch on them. Two are slightly related. So who's the audience for the playbook? And could they be used for-- could it be used for functions outside of HR? And I would say, yes, absolutely.

GABY JOYNER: Yes, absolutely. I mean, as you will have seen, it's very multifaceted. So it can really be used as a communication tool, as a playbook tool for any topic and any need to either consolidate content and guidance and advice and processes and tools and resources or anything that needs communicating. Any topic that needs communicating, it can be used for.

For the specific M&A playbook, we tend to see that the audience is anyone within an organization who is getting involved in or is regularly involved in M&A activity of any type. And that differs in different organizations. So in some organizations, you have a dedicated M&A team.

In other organizations, you might have one individual who's responsible for M&A. But then they're drawing on a network of SME resources from across the organization who they need to equip and enable as quickly as possible to support with a transaction. And so the M&A-- the playbook can play an invaluable role in supporting those individuals.

AMANDA SCOTT: And the other angle of it is sharing information with the acquisition. So one of the questions, is there a case for sharing the playbook or a cut-down version of the playbook with acquisitions?

And again, I think it's how you typically would use it is how you can use it. So you can tear the content to tailor it to the right audience. So it is nice to have a plan with a target. So you could absolutely share pieces of it or think about how you want to use it with an acquisition. Another question was around who owns the administration of the playbook? Is it WTW or the company?

GABY JOYNER: So it would depend on-- again, it varies. So if it was the WTW M&A playbook that I have just demoed to you and you as an organization chose to use that, then generally we would provide you with access to that. And we would own the updating and the evolution of that content over time.

So every time we updated something from a WTW perspective, obviously your access would reflect that as well. If we tailored the site to your specific organization as per that case study I just showed, then again, it can vary.

And you can own and be in charge of the content updates through the content management system I mentioned earlier, or it can be a partnership. You own some of it. We own some of it. Or we can update it.

And actually that case study that I shared with you, we're just in the process of working with that organization to update aspects of the playbook but also to build in a divestment-specific section to the playbook because they've started to look at divestments. And they want some consistent guidance available to their team members to support that. So they are coming to us and asking us to update the content in that particular scenario.

AMANDA SCOTT: Brilliant. And another technical question around, does the tool allow for data storage?

GABY JOYNER: So the tool doesn't store any data. The tool uses data to segment the populations you're trying to communicate to. So it's not a data storage facility. It can facilitate, obviously, the asking of questions. It can facilitate the delivery of those answers back to employees. But it doesn't actually store any data at all.

AMANDA SCOTT: Perfect. Thank you all very much. I know you probably still have even more questions. So we'll wrap up a bit but always happy to have conversations afterwards and hope that you've enjoyed having a bit of a taster of what this could look like. But it's really nice to have a conversation with you directly to just really envision how you would want to use this or could use this.

So as I mentioned at the beginning, we've done this three series at tech deep dives because you asked for it. So we wanted to make sure that you could quickly get into what each of these technologies do so that you have some tool kit to support what you're working on.

So you'll receive a recording again from each of these three sessions and a follow-up email. So feel free to take another listen or share with some of your colleagues. And importantly, again, we're here to answer your questions, give you some more insights or ideas around how you could use it for your specific purposes.

And again, we've only given a bit of a taster here today because they can really adapt. And it really could cover a wide range of needs. So really happy to brainstorm with you what that looks like. And we'll share our contact details and our follow-up email as well so you know who to go to.

But in the meantime, I'm Amanda Scott. And that's Gaby Joyner. So thank you very much. And we hope that you enjoyed it. And thank you so much for your engagement and excellent questions along the way. It made it a lot more interactive and fun. So thank you very much.