Leading the people workstream in a major acquisition

The problem

A large insurance group completed a significant acquisition of a commercial lines business, bringing around 750 employees across multiple locations and functions into the organisation. The people workstream was complex. TUPE applied to the transferring population, but the real challenge went well beyond the legal transfer. Organisational design needed to be worked through to align the incoming business with the acquiring group’s operating model. Data integrity between the two organisations was inconsistent, creating risk around payroll, pensions, reward and onboarding. Change readiness varied significantly across both the incumbent and transferring populations, and there was a real risk that prolonged uncertainty would drive attrition among the people the business most needed to retain. The commercial timeline was fixed and the margin for error on the people side was narrow.

Approach and outcome

I led the people workstream across the full programme, covering TUPE compliance, organisational design, change readiness, data integrity and people-related operational risk. The TUPE consultation was delivered cleanly, with employee liability information challenged and validated on the receiving side to make sure the data coming across was accurate and complete, and no disruption to payroll, pensions, reward or onboarding. I worked closely with operational and functional leaders to align structures, roles and capability to the new operating model, ensuring the integration delivered its intended commercial and operational outcomes rather than just moving names on a chart. Change readiness was tracked and managed across both populations, achieving top-quartile scores against the group’s own benchmarks. Attrition through the transition was held below 13% despite prolonged uncertainty, which was well within the threshold the business had set. The transition into business as usual was clean. One example that summed the approach up: I agreed an early benefits enrolment window with the insured benefits provider, something they said they had never done before, to make sure transferring employees had continuity of cover from day one. It was hard and messy to arrange. Nobody knew we had done it, or why it mattered. But it was the right thing to do, and that was the standard across the whole programme.