Culture Analytics to support Talent and Business Strategy during M&A
Impact
Impact
Presentation
Advanced
30 minutes
Aditya Maharaja & Michaela Abao-Viray
Senior Analysts, People Analytics, Equinix
Mergers and acquisitions are a popular strategic choice for companies’ growth and expansion. However, it has been reported that more than two-thirds of large merger deals fail to create value for shareholders in the medium term.
Researchers proposed many explanations for such high rate of failures, yet one explanation – often underestimated – is the cultural element in M&A integration processes.
Aditya and Michaela’s work aims to better understand the cultural similarities and dissimilarities of two organisations who are about to undergo an M&A process.
Insights gained through performing sentiment analysis and topic modelling on external dataset like Glassdoor reviews, and analysing data collected through internally designed surveys, can be used for making better decisions by the leaders to understand what the pain points of an organisation could be.
Join this advanced session and gain an understanding of the importance of culture in the process of Mergers and Acquisitions, and a way to quantify culture data. Learn ways of working with unstructured data, and utilising it for producing meaningful insights, as well as for designing relevant training programmes for an organisation.
- An understanding of basic principles of M&A, Talent Management, and Culture
- Some technical understanding on the topics of web-scraping, R programming, text mining and sentiment analysis
This session will explore:
- The objective of the project, why this is important
- Roadmap of the wider project
- Methodology – web scraping, topic modelling, sentiment analysis
- Results – thematic grouping of words and topics
- Key takeaways and learnings
Attend and learn:
- An understanding of the importance of culture in the process of Mergers and Acquisitions, and a way to quantify culture data.
- Ways of working with unstructured data, and utilising it for producing meaningful insights
- How to use it for designing relevant training programmes for an organisation.
I was first introduced to the world of data in 2016, while I was working at Teach For India, developing a chat bot for democratising all the organisational data. When I started analysing people data, I quickly realised that what people say and what people do are two different things.
It got even more interesting when we started looking for hidden patterns in data and correlated them to psychological theories. That’s when I decided that I want to go down the path of People Analytics.
After completing my Masters in Org Psych. from London School of Economics, I joined Equinix. In my time at Equinix, I have worked with multiple teams – HR Operations, Rewards, Talent Management, and worked on various projects where I have used data to scale our operations efficiently, use text mining techniques to design better responses to HR Chatbot, understand the importance of Culture in M&A, and also used data to redesign an employee policy.
In my current role, I partner closely with the Head of Talent Management and Rewards to find answers to some of our business problems. I also partner with HRBPs in EMEA and act as an analytics point of contact for EMEA.
Michaela is a people research scientist, culture leader and trusted advisor who has extensive experience in using data to make actionable insights and drive impactful enterprise-wide changes.
She has a solid track record of steering people strategy and programs, leading cross-functional teams and delivering analytics solutions to improve employee experience and manage organisational transformation in global consumer goods companies, private equity firm, retail and tech.
Before pivoting to Workforce Analytics, she held various leadership roles in Organisation Development, Talent Management, Learning and Development and Client Services which built her domain expertise. At Equinix, she partners with Global Talent Management and Organisation Effectiveness, Sales and Customer Experience organisations and works on projects with the goal to improve employee and customer experience and business performance.
Her strong academic background also enabled her to provide solutions that are research and theory based. She completed the Harvard Business Analytics Program (Boston, Massachusetts, USA) in 2019 and earned master’s degrees in Business Administration (Regis University Colorado, USA) and Industrial-Organizational Psychology (University of the Philippines). She is also an active member of Society of Industrial Organizational Psychology (SIOP).
