title: Avoiding "culture rejection" in healthcare mergers and acquisitions: how New Heights Community Health Centres and York Community Services minimized the culture risk when forming Unison Health and Community Services.
abstract: Among the requirements for a successful merger or acquisition are strategic rationale, rigorous due diligence, the right price and revenue and cost synergies. However, bridging the culture gap between organizations is frequently overlooked. The leaders of New Heights Community Health Centres and York Community Services explicitly considered culture in their merger to form Unison Health and Community Services, and they used employee engagement surveys to assess culture in their merger planning and post-merger integration. How Unison Health leaders avoided the risk of culture rejection to achieve a successful merger, and the lessons learned from their experience, is the focus of this article.
authors.affiliation: Principal of Growth Alchemy Group, in Markham, Ontario, and consults to organizations on corporate growth strategy and organizational performance. His interest in mergers and acquisitions comes from a corporate human resources career in which he has worked through acquisitions, mergers and joint ventures on both sides of the transaction, and from his career at McKinsey & Company, where he served a diverse client base in more than 30 countries on growth, corporate strategy and organization performance challenges that often used mergers and acquisitions as a key implementation lever. You can contact him by email at jeffchan@growthalchemy.com.
authors.forename: Jeff
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Chan
mesh_terms: D003151:Community Health Centers / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006273:Health Facility Merger / Q000458:organization & administration*; D009864:Ontario; D019982:Organizational Case Studies; D015279:Organizational Culture