Stabilizing employee confidence after a $37 billion acquisition

Starting point

A North American energy infrastructure company had announced a CAD $37 billion acquisition of a complementary operator in the United States. The deal materially reshaped the combined organization’s footprint and portfolio, but it also created immediate uncertainty for employees across Canadian operations.

Staff were unsure about roles, redundancies, reporting lines, and the future operating model. Rumors were filling the gaps that formal communications had not yet addressed. At the same time, leadership needed to protect productivity, avoid unnecessary attrition, and get people ready for the next phase of integration. They required a rapid, credible way to listen at scale, understand sentiment by group and location, and communicate a clear path forward.

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Approach

The Chief People Officer’s Results Delivery Office, working alongside a global strategy consulting partner on the broader post-merger integration, brought in a team of advisors that included Bhuvan Maingi, now at Strathen Group, to design an employee confidence program for Canadian operations. The mandate was to build a structured listening process, translate what employees were saying into actionable themes, and co-create day-one communications that addressed the issues that mattered most.

The work began with diagnostics. The advisors designed and ran structured focus groups and surveys for over 2000 employees across headquarters and key locations. Session composition was carefully managed to create psychological safety: groups were separated from direct reporting lines, mixed thoughtfully by role and tenure, and facilitated with clear ground rules on confidentiality. Inputs were anonymized, coded by theme, and segmented by location and function to show where risks were concentrated.

Next, the themes were translated into action. Working with the Results Delivery Office and the post-merger integration team, they synthesized employee concerns into a concise set of priority themes such as role clarity, decision-making, communication cadence, culture, and perceived fairness of changes. Each theme was mapped to risks, required actions, and owners, and aligned with existing integration workstreams so that people issues were wired into the broader PMI plan, not treated as a separate side project.

Finally, the team co-created a day-one communications package. This included a welcome pack and FAQ that explained the strategic rationale for the acquisition, what was changing and what was not, and immediate next steps for employees. Leader talking points, meeting-in-a-box materials, and a simple update cadence were developed so that frontline leaders could have consistent, informed conversations with their teams rather than improvising.

Instead of guessing what people feared, leadership invested in a structured listening process and used it to shape the messages, actions, and cadence of the integration.

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Outcome

The program gave leadership a grounded, evidence-based view of how employees were experiencing the acquisition, beyond corridor conversations and anecdotal feedback. They could see, by theme and location, where uncertainty was highest, which risks were most material, and which actions would address the concerns that mattered most.

Employees received clear, direct answers to their top questions through the day-one pack, FAQs, and leader-led sessions. Knowing how their roles fit into the future operating model, what decisions were still pending, and when to expect updates reduced some of the ambient anxiety that typically follows a large acquisition.

For the integration team, the work linked employee sentiment directly to actions and governance. Priority themes were tied to specific owners, timelines, and success measures, and integrated into existing PMI workstreams. This helped avoid the common pattern where “people issues” are acknowledged but not operationalized.

The employee confidence program became part of a broader effort to protect organizational health during the transaction, maintain productivity, and prepare teams for the more detailed operating model and organization design work that followed.

For people and integration leaders, the biggest win was moving from one-way announcements to a two-way cycle of listening, targeted responses, and visible follow-through.

This engagement continues to shape how Strathen Group approaches post-merger integration, pairing structured listening with clear day-one communications so leaders can manage sentiment, protect productivity, and link “people issues” directly to operating plans.