SUCH is the pace of modern business and the keenness of domestic and global competition that sometimes it seems as if companies are in a perpetual state of change – whether it’s departmental restructuring or mergers and acquisitions.

This is also an era, however, marked by competition to recruit and retain the best talent. How do you keep the most talented people during bouts of corporate upheaval?

Research by the recruitment group Kenexa shows that during mergers and acquisitions feelings of job insecurity rise significantly along with a desire to find a new job. These trends are even more marked if the change involves job losses.

Jack Wiley at Kenexa argues that while a heightened sense of insecurity during times of corporate upheaval is only human, companies could be doing more to reassure employees – and in the process improving retention.

“Companies often overlook the risk of talent loss during mergers and acquisitions,” said Wiley. “They also underestimate the effect on employees’ ability to do their job and serve customers. This can have a bad outcome for a newly merged business.

“To keep people engaged, management has to have a vision and it has to communicate it to its people. During periods of uncertainty people are ravenous for information and so communication has to be constant. Companies could communicate much better than they do.”

Communication and vision from leaders are also cited by Raj Tulsiani, chief executive of Green Park Interim & Executive Resourcing, who said it was crucial to communicate with people – particularly those you most want to keep – during periods of upheaval.

“Headhunters are notorious for focusing on organisations going through change,” he said. “When uncertainty sets in, people who don’t really want to leave think they should at least look round to be on the safe side. So they register with a few recruitment firms and, unfortunately for their company, sometimes a good job comes up.

“It’s important for businesses to know the key players at all levels and to keep them engaged. That can be achieved through training opportunities, financial bonuses to stay, or through having consultants coaching key staff through the period of change.

“It’s important to make the people you want to retain feel as if they have some form of control over events, that they understand the process and grasp the bigger picture. Tell people everything you can tell them.”

This may not seem like rocket science, but Tulsiani said sometimes a company’s top team is so focused on organisational changes that it forgets about people and how they are feeling.

Jim Matthewman at Mercer, the HR consultancy, agrees. “The most difficult issue is getting people to understand the value of a change and the rationale behind it. Where that doesn’t happen you find a lot of anxiety among employees about whether their current roles have a future and in the case of mergers, for example, whether they may end up reapplying for their own jobs.”

He said this is entirely understandable during change, but added that it can be “difficult to get to the people you want to keep to reassure them”.

Matthewman said there is a race to reach key players once a merger deal is done. Even if the best are persuaded to stay until the dust has settled, continued upheaval during the first 100 days can upset the good people so much that they leave.

Some observers argue that one of the reasons that Wm Mor-rison’s 2004 takeover of rival supermarket chain Safeways ran into crisis was because too little attention was paid to its people.

According to Matthewman, companies that take over others often have a poor attitude towards the staff and culture of the acquired company. “They often see themselves as the A team and the acquired company as the B team,” he said.

DSGI, parent company for Currys and PC World, said long-term planning and looking after its people protected it from losing staff during a recent overhaul of its supply-chain network designed to save it £16m a year.

The changes affected the shift patterns and other working practices of 2,000 staff – and included the closure of some distribution warehouses, forcing staff there to consider relocation, commuting or moving on.

DSGI’s human resources manager Allyson Williams said that staff retention actually improved during the period of upheaval, putting this down to vision and communication. Employees were kept informed well ahead of the changes and as many warehouse staff as possible were retained. Good communication played such a big role that the flow of information has continued after the overhaul.

Richard Brady was working as a site trainer in Sheffield at one of the depots earmarked for closure. He and all the other staff were offered jobs at the Newark depot, 30 miles away.

“There were a lot of mixed feelings among warehouse staff,” said Brady, 35, who didn’t drive. “I’d say that at the start the split was 70:30 against taking up a job at Newark, but by the end of a long consultation process that had shifted to 70:30 in favour. I think this had everything to do with the support the company gave people.”

DSGI offered transition support to its employees, including £500 worth of vouchers for any kind of training – whether or not staff intended to stay on – sessions with The Mind Gym, a consultancy, which encouraged staff to think about their career direction both within and outside DSGI, and advice on job seeking and CV writing.

With Brady, DSGI may have deployed one of the retention strategies mentioned by Green Park’s Tulsiani. Brady was offered the same job in the Newark depot if he wanted it, but was also nudged towards training for a more strategic role in the company.

“It all made me more ambitious about where I wanted to go,” said Brady. “I took driving lessons and then I took up a £5,000 car grant from the company. I commute the 30 miles now to Newark and the car grant doesn’t have to be paid back as long as I stay with the company for three years. The point is that during the process the company made me feel special and wanted.”

So there it is: during times of change, the company that looks after its people gets to keep them.

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