Picture this — you’re walking into an impromptu all-employee meeting. You’re excited to see some old colleagues you haven’t seen in a while. The snacks and drinks are set out to enjoy after the meeting. Life is good. And then you hear the words, ”we’ve been acquired.” The room falls silent. A few employees burst into tears. Celebrating for most is now last on their list of priorities.

I’ve been there.

When it comes to mergers and acquisitions, we can really break things down into three buckets — culture, risk transfer (meaning insurance), and legal. Most often, it seems the legal portion is addressed first while, unfortunately, insurance and culture are mere after thoughts.

Insurance Impacts

From an insurance perspective, there are many things that really need to be addressed in advance of the acquisition close date, including the following questions:

• How does this acquisition affect the acquiring company’s insurance program?
• How does this affect the acquired company’s insurance program?
• What insurance can be consolidated now?
• What insurance policies have change in control language requiring the acquired organization to immediately be insured on the acquiring company’s policy?
• Does the acquired company have the same IT practices & procedures (multifactor authentication, encryption, etc.) that the acquired company has?
• Will the cyber insurer be OK with including coverage or the newly acquired entity if they don’t?

Those questions are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Property Casualty insurance, and we haven’t even addressed the 401k, benefits, or payroll yet!

Addressing Culture Issues

When it comes to culture, ensuring management teams are aligned is vital. This can help:

• Determine a communication plan for employees
• Drive engagement, productivity, and employer satisfaction
• Ultimately determine if an acquisition will thrive or fall flat on its face

If employees are constantly worrying if they’ll still have a job, their role will change, their manager will change, how their benefits might change, etc., they’re likely looking for other jobs or simply not being productive. At the end of the day, the looming question for each and every individual employee is “how does this affect me?”

So, what can you do? I encourage you to join Holmes Murphy General Counsel Chris Nelson, ethOs President Ali Payne, and me for an upcoming webinar on June 23. In this webinar, we’ll be discussing all the impacts I mentioned and more. You won’t want to miss it! Click here to register!

You can also reach out to us at any time with any questions! You don’t have to wait for the webinar to get your questions answered.