The garrulous Stelios has since moved on to extend his easy brand into other sectors. As the dust settles on the merger deal, with the two central characters now departed, the human resources team at easyJets head office in Luton are left to grapple with the complex realities of making the merger happen.
Of course, no merger is ever completely trouble-free. Generally HR staff dont get involved with mergers early enough. What tends to happen is that the CEOs do the deals and then leave the people details to others. HR is at the forefront of making the merger work from the perspective of easyJet and Go employees.
The trickiest issue is aligning the processes to make sure that everyone across the new company knows what is expected of them from an HR point of view, says Suzanne Kielty, HR manager for easyJet. She is keen to quash any suggestions that easyJet is imposing its own way of doing things on its newly acquired company, although it isnt difficult to see why one would think so when the merged company is to be called easyJet.
If Go has a process that is more effective than easyJets then we will use that process, Kielty maintains. Some of the ways in which Go has ollated data have been a lot more effective than easyJets. Were trying to recommend the best way rather than the easyJet way.
Whether any merger will work is notoriously difficult to judge. And while on the surface it might seem that the two no-frills airlines are well-matched, this could be misleading. Even though Go is a new company, it might have quickly established a very strong company culture, says Frances Wilson, HR adviser for the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. While easyJet has a reputation as a quick-moving entrepreneurial start-up, Go was originally created by BA and therefore staff could be saddled with a more traditional, corporate mind-set and approach. It also seems, according to Stelios at his final press conference, that there are challenging issues still to be addressed on the staff contracts of Go staff, although easyJet refuses to elaborate on what these issues might be.
One key task for the easyJet HR team in the months ahead will be to identify how decisions were made at Go. For a merger to work, Wilson explains, it is important to evaluate how empowered front-line staff feel in both organisations. How customer relations are subsequently conducted is also a crucial area for analysis. One of the main drivers of any merger is the desire to reduce the overall costs of the two organisations, and this merger will be no different. Technology will play a crucial part in making this happen. At the moment easyJets intranet is being used as a vehicle for conveying news about the newly merged company. And early next year all staff will be able to access their HR details and update them through the intranet on a self-service basis. Kielty says that staff will be able to book holidays and view their pay slips online. As airline staff tend to be on the move, this is a useful way for them to keep tabs on when they have been paid. They will also be able to input their own sickness details. Another plan is for work shifts to be posted on the intranet as well.
In keeping with the spirit of the no-frills airline, easyJet wants its HR systems to help create an efficient, back-end operation. It does not make sense to have people dedicated for example to changing addresses when staff can do it themselves,
Kielty says. The whole philosophy of easyJet is low cost and quick access, confirms Justine Perkins, business development manager for RebusHR, who has been acting as a consultant during the merger. They want to make sure the data they have access to is up-to-date. There is more of a push for employees to take responsibility for their own data as they have a vested interest in getting it right.
Setting up centralised systems for the newly-merged company carries a number of risks. Reliability will be paramount. If members of the newly-acquired company cannot for example get access to important HR information such as how much leave they have left or their pension details, then this can affect employee motivation. Its not very good for morale if your company has been taken over and you are left feeling like an outsider because your data has been moved to another system, says Perkins.
Most experts agree that easyJet and Go have been wise to concentrate early on in creating common data from both organisations. It gets you to the point of acting on hard facts and not on supposition. But thats all it does, stresses Richard Coates, head of mergers and acquisitions for Mercer Human Resources Consulting. Its an enabler, he adds. At least you know what you are dealing with. You know, for example, what the different benefit set-ups are. You have the information to act on. It helps because it makes decision-making easier. However he warns that it would be a mistake to rely too extensively on a software system as a means of merging an organisation.
Instead the top team at easyJet will still have to think very carefully about the kind of business they want to create and the cultural goals and strategy they want to achieve. As the HR team grapples with bringing the new airlines together, arch-rivals such as Ryanair are waiting with interest to see if the sum of the merged company is a bigger competitive threat than its former parts.