You are Imogen Farrar, Group People Director of Halden & Crew Engineering in Leeds, five weeks after a merger you announced as one of equals. Senior engineers are resigning at nearly three times the settled rate, and before you spend a pound of the one fund left to you, you must decide what you will treat as the reason.
The situation
Halden & Crew designs water and environmental infrastructure for UK utilities. Five weeks ago it completed an all-share merger with Tarn Civil Partners of Bristol, taking a 1,150-person firm to a group of 1,770. For thirty years it has recruited on continuity: an engineer-led firm that has never made a compulsory redundancy. You wrote the Day-1 message that spoke of a merger of equals and repeated that promise. It carries your name.
Three things reached the workforce in the last week of February. The new organisation chart showed 90 roles that now exist twice. A synergy slide leaked, citing £9 million of cost reduction “including approximately 6% of headcount”. And the pay-data merge revealed that the two firms' bands differ by up to 14% for the same grade.
On Monday 9 March the weekly pulse read 51, against 72 before completion, and 58% of free-text comments used words of anger, anxiety or betrayal, against 20% a fortnight earlier. Perceived fairness stands at 35: 29 on the Tarn side, 41 on the Halden side. Regretted attrition among the 210 senior engineers, who sign off designs and hold the client relationships, runs at 19% a year against 7% in a settled year. Replacing one costs about £95,000.
The integration board meets on 15 May. If attrition is not below 10% by then, it will take the £9 million out of headcount: compulsory redundancies. You have a ring-fenced £1.2 million fund and nothing else. Four engineers have resigned in five weeks, and their exit conversations point four ways: one took a competitor's offer after seeing what a Tarn-side peer earned at his grade; one said nobody had told her anything since the announcement; one found his job twice on the chart with no word on whose it was; one resigned the day after the slide began to circulate.