Changes at work

I work in a mid sized Healthcare company with about 1400 employees. In April we were alerted to the fact that our current owners were putting the company up for sale. Our company has been in business for 26 years and the three primary owners were looking to sell.

There was some early discomfort with some projects getting canceled and others moving up in prioritization but there was not a lot of early change. We (my staff and I) spoke on many occasions about the future and we all decided to take a wait and see approach. In September the new owners were identified, however Federal Securities Laws prohibited the two companies from talking for 30 days. During this period, my staff and others were very uneasy and it took extra effort to continue to communicate effectively and keep our Production environments supported appropriately.

The 30 day period ended about 2 weeks ago and we were introduced to our new management team. It was a little disconcerting as the new management team read from prepared statements and did not appear that engaged. All members of our Senior Staff were released in an appropriate manner and they probably sailed out with a nice big severance.

Our new management communicated that together we were going to make a great team and their strategy was to take the Best of Breed Applications and Practices within each organization and merge them into one. They communicated that they were working on a 90 day plan that would identify the strategy for the future.

As we work toward our 90 day strategy, discussions surrounding our Production Applications have come up and it appears that the overall strategy will be to move all of our Production Applications to their datacenter, 4 states away. Now this has not been formally communicated from our new management, however the word got out and our internal management did a good job of getting in front of this strategy and communicated what they knew.

Internal Management did communicate that the long term strategy would be to have all the Production equipment in one facility, and that facility would not be our facility. They emphasized that this is a long term strategy and would take 6 to 12 months to accomplish, however it has become very clear to most of us that at some point, there will be layoffs and our overall headcount will be downsized by 75%.

This leads to a lot of speculation, poor moral and loss of productivity.

How do you try and maintain a stable support environment when everyone around you is distracted by the possibility of loosing your job ?

More to come ……