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The magazines of Time Inc and the Meredith Corporation will soon be combined into one publicly traded company but how smoothly will the merger go for the executives and employees? The corporate cultures of the two companies appear to be very different and when the former Meredith president took the reigns at Time Inc, he lasted just 6 months. Time cited differences in approach and leadership style as the reason he was asked to leave.
Ironing out the financial details in buy-outs and mergers can be extremely challenging but ironing out cultural differences in the executives and employees can be just as challenging. Each company’s employees are used to conducting their daily work-lives in a certain manner and a merger does not automatically change corporate culture. Rather, it is a slower process of employees adapting and fitting in as they see how their counterparts from the merging company do things. A key component of employee happiness in the workplace is how well they ‘fit’ in the job. When an employee experiences a merger, the ‘fit’ that they may have felt previously may no longer be there and they may have a tough road to finding a new way to fit in, if they are even able to do so. Mergers can be difficult for top executives all the way down to line employees.
For further reading, an interesting article here about the 10 all-time best and worse company mergers.
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