Culture Isn’t Just HR’s Job in a Merger

Another musing from CoreNet Global, this time from a session hosted by Andrew Hallissey from Colliers, featuring reflections from Harald Egger and Jennifer Canter of UBS. The focus was on their experience navigating the workplace implications of UBS’s recent merger with Credit Suisse.

Now, I can’t go into the details of what was shared, but the conversation stirred something in me — a long-standing fascination with what happens when two organisations, and more importantly two cultures, are fused together. Because when businesses merge, it’s rarely just the systems or structures that need integration. It’s the ways of working, the rituals, the assumptions, the expectations — the workplace DNA that often runs deep beneath the surface.

Much of the conversation — and in fact, most property-focused merger and acquisition talk — tends to centre on the portfolio. And it makes sense. You’ve suddenly inherited an entirely new set of buildings, a second property team, another set of contractors, and a long supply chain full of duplicated products, platforms and services. I can’t begin to imagine the sheer volume of work involved in sorting through all that.

There are big decisions to make — who stays, who goes, what buildings are kept, what gets let go, and why. Then there’s the small matter of bringing all the data together. The data! Can you imagine? Two separate systems, reporting frameworks, naming conventions, contract terms, lease lengths, operating models — the list goes on. Just aligning it all is a task in itself, never mind making strategic decisions off the back of it.

Now, elsewhere in the business, there’ll be an HR team working hard to onboard the incoming employees. And rightly so. Just like the property team, the rest of the organisation will be mapping duplication, aligning contracts, sorting out payroll, and trying to knit two complex entities into one. But what I suspect often gets overlooked is the connection point between HR and CRE/FM — especially when it comes to culture.

Because it's one thing to onboard someone and help them understand the organisation they've just been folded into — or the organisation that everyone is collectively becoming. But I’m always more curious about the difference between the corporate culture (the one that gets talked about) and the actual culture (the one that lives in the day-to-day behaviours on the ground).

At Audiem, our working definition of culture is inspired by Seth Godin: people like us, do things like this. That thinking sits at the heart of how we’ve structured the People section in our Workplace Mix framework. It breaks workplace culture down into four key elements:

• Community – who people work with
• Drivers – why people work the way they do
• Activities – what people actually do to gettheir work done
• Behaviours – how they go about doing it, day in,day out

If you want to understand the lived experience of your organisation — especially during something as disruptive as a merger — this is where you need to look.

When you take those four elements — community, drivers, activities and behaviours — you start to build a picture of how work actually gets done. And if that’s the case, then understanding the differences between two merging organisations becomes absolutely crucial.

What are the expectations of the workforce you’re inheriting? What kind of habits, rhythms and cultural norms are they bringing with them? What adjustments do you need to make to your existing workplace strategy to accommodate that? And what kind of change management will be required to help them adapt — or to help you adapt to them?

The example I always come back to is EE and BT. Both part of the same group, but with very different vibes when you walk through their workplaces. BT sites — and I’m generalising here — tend to feel more traditional. Often older stock, legacy fit-outs, spaces that could use a bit of love. EE, on the other hand, feels more “of the moment”. Their spaces tend to be more modern, with better amenities and a bit more energy to them.

Now imagine lifting the EE workforce and dropping them into a 50-year-old BT office. That wouldn’t just be a facilities issue. That’s a cultural clash. And it’s a classic example of why portfolio planning and culture mapping need to happen together.

That’s exactly why we built the Workplace Mix framework the way we did — to make sure those different aspects of work are consideredtogether. And it’s why the Audiem platform is designed not just to process feedback at scale, but to surface the connections between those elements.

What are the cultural considerations at play, and how are they being influenced by technology or space? Or the other way around — what cultural traits are being undermined by your current workplace setup? These are the things you need to know. You need to spot them, understand them, and make decisions with them in mind.

So that’s my message to workplace teams navigating a merger: don’t just focus on the (very important) portfolio rationalisation or CRE org chart. And don’t leave culture to HR like it’s a standalone task. Culture and space rub against each other constantly. Overlook that friction and you risk missing what matters.

Start with that question in mind — how do these things fit together?

It might just be the key to unlocking a merger that works.

‍