Grab Ahold of the Change

When businesses go through a big change, such as a merger or acquisition, they tend to focus on things like the financial reasons for doing so, the challenges of blending their technologies, and the potential fight with government regulators. Sometimes, their people get lost in the shuffle.

Earlier this week, Grab and Uber announced that Uber would be selling its Southeast Asia operations to Grab. Amidst all the talk about transitioning drivers to the new app, and the potential impact on customers of the reduced competition, Uber’s corporate employees in Singapore initially appeared to be forgotten.

Reports emerged that Uber employees were given two hours to clear out their desks and get out. Grab’s head of HR made a public statement later that it was all a misunderstanding, that all the Uber employees would have a job with Grab, and they would be placed on paid leave (not a bad deal!) until it could all be worked out. The problem, she said, was that they weren’t able to communicate that to the Uber employees because they didn’t have their email addresses. They subsequently held a town hall to explain the plan to everyone.

It’s great that Grab plans to absorb Uber’s staff into their own, but the mixup at the start of the transition may be a big turnoff to many of the Uber folks, and to future potential recruits, too. It gave the impression that a lot more attention was paid to arranging the finances and writing the PR announcements, with little thought to the people, and this could create the feeling that people don’t matter much. This is probably not an accurate reflection of what really happened – it sounds like Grab may have a well thought out HR plan that simply had a momentary lapse in execution – but in human capital, perceptions often matter more than reality. There are plenty of areas in a business where you can make a mistake and fix it later, but the first impression you give people is not something that is easily correctable.

When you plan a major change, your HR team needs to be part of the process at the beginning, and needs to be getting ready along with every other function. Whether you are opening a new product line, moving into new markets, merging with another company, or planning to cut back, your HR experts need to be part of that decision at the start, and need to be putting plans together all along the way.

A few years ago we worked with a telco that was planning to get one of the new wireless network licenses being offered by Myanmar’s government, and start operations there. After making the decision to bid on the license, the business leadership came back to HR and said, “now, find us the people.” That posed a problem: there weren’t enough qualified telecom engineers in Myanmar to build and run the network, and bringing in people from the home country was going to be prohibitively expensive. The company actually lost out in their bid on the license, which may have been a good thing, since they didn’t have the human capital to meet their needs…something they would have known from the start, if they had only asked.

Your people cannot be an afterthought; they are the heart of the business. If they are not on board when you make a major change, that change will be far more disruptive than it needs to be.