Merger Setting The Foundational Blocks Of People, Culture And Identity
The recent merger anouncement of Dixcy and Enamour has given rise to many new changes and appointments, along with some policy changes too. Let's delve deep and see what else has the merger in store for our people with Sanchayan Paul, CHRO, Modenik Lifestyle.
1. What is the role of HR in building a common culture and identity during the merger?
A sense of ‘shared purpose’ brings people together. Setting a clear vision, helps people see direction, while putting together the organizational values helps build a common understanding of ways of working to reach the intermediate commercial goals and attaining the long-term vision.
At Modenik, our shared purpose is “Evolving every day for an elevated lifestyle.” We are all living in a VUCA world which is experiencing unprecedented change and human beings and businesses need to “evolve every day” to stay relevant and make progress. It is this common belief and passion, that bring us together, to create a strong platform to provide essential clothing for all ages, gender, and income groups. Our products are an integral part of our consumers’ life, and we will make comfortable and fashionable essential wear for them, by leveraging design and technology.
We engaged with employees, towards our vision of ‘Being the most preferred company for comfortable & fashionable essential clothing’, and what it means for them. All my colleagues across levels, understand that to achieve our short-term commercial goals and long-term vision, each of us shall need to ‘collaborate’, ‘challenge boundaries’, ‘do things the right way’ and ‘happen it happen’. These are our ways of working or organizational values.
Having set the foundational blocks of our people culture & identity, and we are now building upwards and onwards on this.
2. How to identify, motivate and retain talent during such transition? What are you doing to support employees through cultural change post the mergers?
We started preparing for the merger, right from the start of FY’21. We first formulated our strategy & commercial goals i.e., where we need to get to by FY’24 and how. Then we worked with leading strategy & management consulting firms and our Leadership team, to create a ‘fit-for-future’ organization structure and capabilities required to achieve our commercial goals.
To have the best and the most capable talent in the structure, we build a functional and leadership competency framework, which was an objective framework to arrive at people decisions. We have been able to offer significantly larger roles across levels and functions, and we have backed the potential and ambition of our people by offering them the necessary developmental inputs.
With the merged capabilities, we have established our ‘Right to Win’ in the market. For our employees, this brings advantages that come with scale i.e., bigger & broader roles, opportunities to learn and grow and work on big transformation projects in areas like Go-To-Market, Digitalization, People Capability building and more.
To support employees, through change, we are investing in capability building, enhancing knowledge of products from the business that they are not familiar with and listening & communicating frequently with them.
3. Key challenges you faced during the merger and how did you overcome them?
Loss of talent and loss of business are the two watchouts in any merger. As I said earlier, we started preparing very early in the both the businesses and setting them up for a successful merger.
The Enamor and Dixcy merger, was a merger of complimentary businesses. Neither was competing with the other in the market, so the coming together was all for a larger purpose. Both businesses had talent with complimentary & supplementary skill sets.
Dixcy was strong in wholesale and distribution, while Enamor, had its strengths in Modern Retail and e-Commerce. Hence, we had very limited loss of talent. These were primarily with those employees who did not believe in our purpose or were not fit for the roles that we had or did not wish to take up roles offered to them.
4. With this recent merger announcement, how is the new leadership at Modenik Lifestyle structured now?
Our current talent and the new joinees are here because we all share a common purpose and are working towards a common vision of becoming “the most preferred company for comfortable & fashionable essential clothing (innerwear, thermals and casualwear)”
Our Leadership Team brings experience across start-ups and large multi-national companies like Vodafone, Walmart, Colgate – Palmolive, Mondelez, Kellogg’s, Fonterra, General Electric, Marico & Sara Lee. Sunil Sethi, our Executive Chairman; Shekhar Tiwari, previously the CEO of Enamor, has taken on the role of Chief Category & Operations Officer at Modenik; Manish Daga, CFO of the merged entity; Nikhil Narkhede joined us from Cloudtail India to head our Supply Chain; Veenesh Priyadarshi as the Chief Sales and Customer Development Office. Veenesh, an alumnus of Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Bangalore; Sandra Daniels, an Enamor veteran, continues to head the Marketing function for Women’s Category; Ketan Chunchanur, an MBA from Asian Institute of Management, Philippines, leads Strategy and Transformation office at Modenik.
5. Were there any job losses? How did you identify which jobs/employees were to be retained?
To have the best and the most capable talent in the structure, we build a functional and leadership competency framework, which was an objective framework to arrive at people decisions.
The decisions were shared in one-on-one conversations, with transparency. We needed to have some difficult conversations, as well. These were primarily with those employees who did not believe in our purpose or were not fit for the roles that we had or did not wish to take up roles offered to them. Employees were treated with respect, while not allowing emotions to take-away the objectivity from the equation.
We ensured that the merged team structures were transparently announced and shared with all. This ensured that the employees knew their roles and responsibilities well and were ready to contribute meaningfully.
While we made the transitions quick, we are spending a lot of time on the transformation. We continue to communicate with the employees at regular intervals to understand their pulse and act proactively.
6. What steps did you undertake for employee development and training, during and post-merger integration process?
Aligned to our commercial goals and values, over the last 12 months, we have helped each employee set their annual goals on the 3 themes of Growth, Efficiency and Capability. This has not just helped employees know what they will need to do in the combined business but provided them with clarity and transparency on how their performance will be evaluated. Rather than managing performance, we are doing everything to ensure that we enable performance – with focus on both the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of performance.
We are building people manager capabilities through development plans and 1-on-1 discussions on enabling people through this transition. We are investing in capability building for people managers & senior leaders, while enhancing functional competencies.
7. How did you deal with balancing out the HR policies and initiatives of employees at Dixcy and Enamor coming together under one umbrella now?
The starting point & core of any merger is the cultural integration of the teams, even as the “harder” aspects like policies, processes and total rewards get integrated in the course of time. We avoided suddenness and surprises, putting a lot of time and energy to understand the details and take a planned approach.
Frequent, transparent & open communication plays a key role in building trust amongst employees. Often HR teams hurry into integrating the “harder” aspects, while missing out on creating the building blocks of purpose, vision, common goals and values.
As we start harmonizing policies and people programs, we are benchmarking to our relevant talent market. Versus, choosing policies or practices of one company, we are evaluating what is the best for the long-term success of the business and then we shall be arriving at the harmonized policies.
8. What according to you will be the 5 most influential HR Trends to look out for in times to come and how should companies prioritize them? (number them with the primary one at the top, followed by rest).
In the current scenario, where predictability is low, businesses & people are often worried about the future and need the right capability building. HR will need to work on various front to build organizational & people capability to manage through such phases. According to me, the most influential trends to look out for, are:
