Feeling the Change — Halden & Crew's Merger Aftermath

A four-round, advanced Organisational Behaviour & Change simulation set inside Halden & Crew Engineering, a 1,150-person Leeds water-infrastructure consultancy that has just completed an all-share merger with the 620-person Tarn Civil Partners, creating a 1,770-person UK group. The firm's 30-year-old 'engineer-led, no-layoffs' promise is now in doubt: five weeks into integration the pulse score has fallen from 72 to 51, negative-emotion comments have jumped from 20% to 58%, only 29% of Tarn-side and 41% of Halden staff agree the merger is being handled fairly, and regretted attrition among the 210 billable senior engineers is running at 19% versus a 7% baseline — each leaver costing ~GBP 95K plus stalled client projects. You are the HR lead with a single ring-fenced fund of GBP 1.2M and eight weeks to get attrition below 10% by the 15 May board review, or the board triggers the forced redundancies that would break the Day-1 promise outright. Playing through four rounds you (1) read the emotional event signals — separating one-off affective events like the leaked synergy slide from chronic strain like the 14% pay-band gap, and naming which emotion is the leading indicator of senior attrition; (2) restore fairness by allocating the GBP 1.2M across the three justice types — distributive pay harmonisation (GBP 850K), procedural transparent criteria and appeals (GBP 120K), and an interactional manager explain-and-listen cascade (GBP 200K) — learning that procedural and interactional justice move trust faster and cheaper than the loudest, most expensive distributive fix; (3) enable bounded job crafting under the freeze as a near-zero-cost lever for meaning and engagement, setting guardrails so unloved-but-critical compliance and QA work stays covered; and (4) integrate everything into a board-ready stabilisation plan that translates fairness and crafting into the cash that protects the GBP 9M synergy, while responding to a live press leak without contradicting the Day-1 promise. The scoring rewards segment-specific, procedural-and-interactional-first, abatement-of-attrition strategies with a board case framed in cash — and punishes the five classic errors: expensive-fix bias (blowing the budget on pay), undifferentiated treatment of the workforce, suppressing the negative-comment signal, unbounded or strangled job crafting, and a soft 'it is the right thing to do' board framing. Final KPIs track Wellbeing (pulse 0-100), Perceived Fairness (0-100), Change Adoption (0-100) and Regretted Attrition (% annualised, lower better).