When the General Insurance business of Commercial Union and General Accident were in discussions about merging, Tony Clarry, the Director of HR and Communications called in Kiddy and Partners, a firm of business psychologists to work with him and his team to help them address what they called the people side of the merger.

Evidence from mergers in other organisations showed that some of the greatest concerns of employees in a merger situation were "what is the other company like? how do they treat their staff? what is it like to work there?".

To address these concerns, as part of a wider range of people initiatives, a special pre-merger Discovery Programme was devised. This involved around 200 employees - nominated by their co-workers - from each organisation meeting and talking to their counterparts to find out about each others' culture, values, working practices etc.

These culture due diligence meetings involved completing a questionnaire, semi-structured interviews as well as the opportunity for a looser-based dialogue with their opposite numbers.

The results were analysed and then fed back to a large group convocation (a special type of interactive conference) of over 500 nominated representatives (staff and management) from both organisations. These representatives then worked on the cultural differences and alignments to produce a 'culture blue-print' for the new organisation.

One of the Group Board Directors commented afterwards that he'd never believed it was possible to see so much focused energy and effort into helping the birth of the new business.

Dr Brian Baxter served as the first Chairman of the Association of Business Psychologists and was formerly a partner in KPL. His areas of professional interests include organisational culture, wellbeing at work and facilitation of Board-level decision-making.