Bank Mergers: The deal closed. What do your employees want to know?

The focus here is primarily for bank buyers, but it has contextual value for sellers as well.

This is being provided as an aid to make your acquisition go as successfully as possible.

Please read it in the spirit in which it is intended.

If you get good at this, you will distinguish yourself in your employees’ eyes and that, in turn, will be felt by your customers.

In addition to the employee interaction that has taken place since the announcement, you will want to have an employee meeting blitz as well.

By that I mean a concentrated effort to sit down for a face-to-face meeting with each employee.

The goal of the employee meeting blitz is to make certain you can alleviate any fears they have that their role in the bank is being disrupted by the change.

It may seem like you just did this within the past 90 days, but it’s time to do it again following the closing of the merger.

There’s no such thing as over communicating.

Your competition has been calling on your newly attained employees non-stop since the announcement.

They will be ramping it up further post-closing.

It is important to understand that switching to another employer comes at a cost.

It is very disruptive to your employee’s life.

What they really want is to not have their employer become a distraction to what they do on a day-to-day basis.

They want to know that the time they have invested in their career is going to be put to good use.

They want to know they are not going to be going through abrupt role or wage and benefit changes without an ability to smoothly incorporate the changes into their lives.

And they want to know that the “new guys” know who they are, respect them, and want them.

The employees are less interested in logo items branded with the new brand and statements about who you are.

Those statements that may be true but are boring and have no meaning because they are said by everybody all the time.

“We care about our employees.”

It’s just noise if not accompanied by actions proving the claim.

I guess the only good thing about corporate platitudes is that you can count on the competition’s message to your employees being, “We’re reaching out to see if you’re interested in an exploratory call to see if there are potential synergies.”

Terms and phrases that mean nothing but sound cool.

It’s filler.

That kind of talk takes the place of the real work they need to do to communicate the role they are recruiting for.

There is a natural tendency to turn inward to focus on the changes going on in your world post-closing, but that urge needs to be tempered with the need to call on the new employees.

It’s the right thing to do.

You have made a major investment and are counting on the future earnings power of the bank you just acquired to pay for the acquisition and contribute to even higher earnings for the combined bank.

The work you put into the year following the closing date, if done properly, will pay repeatedly into the future.

Resist the temptation to think, “Well, that’s done. What’s next?”

You have too much riding on this.

Action Plan:

• Think through the employees of your bank.
• Review a list of all employees and prioritize the list, giving consideration to who has the most impact on the bank to the least. Your management succession plan should be a great guide.
• How would you present each employee to the buyer of your bank?
• What would the buyer want to know about each employee?

Your path will:

• Inform your strategic plan.
• Guide your annual business plan and budget.
• Clarify priorities.
• Define your message so it can be communicated with confidence.

This is how savvy bankers navigate.

They build smart and valuable banks and choose the best time to sell – serving the needs of the shareholders and the board.

I hope you found this short lesson helpful.

What are your thoughts?

I’ll see you next week.