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Supermarket takeover was "a meeting of cultures"
Keywords:
Mergers and acquisitions, Growth, Retailing, Organizational change, Employee relations, Organizational culture, Asda, Wal-Mart
The most important element of successful change is never to let your people get offside, says Marie Gill, head of organizational development at UK supermarket Asda, which recently merged with Wal-Mart, one of the world's largest retailers.
She was speaking at a forum organized by Brathay, a UK provider of people-development solutions, on how Asda managed change when employees first faced the possibility of a merger with Wal-Mart.
"The important thing for us was to ensure that our people understood that this takeover was a meeting of cultures", she said. "We educated them with the ethos that we were becoming part of the Wal-Mart family.
"At first, there were mixed views, but at Asda we pride ourselves that all of our managers lead from the front. In the past we have always been up front and honest with our employees, which meant that the trust has always existed between Asda staff and management. With this, we knew that our managers could lead the culture change in a positive and effective way, and not allow rumor and speculation to come into the equation."
Symbiotic relationship
Marie Gill continued: "Becoming part of the Wal-Mart family made sense in so many ways. Before the merger we had become friends with Wal-Mart and had already taken a lot of the ideas it was using over in the USA. At this point, Wal-Mart realized that Asda was actually doing some of these things better and wanted to learn a lot from us, mainly on the food side of the business. In that way, it was a symbiotic relationship. Wal-Mart, being a big merchandise company, helped us to learn a new approach to effective merchandising in order for us to grow and prosper."
She added:...