SETTING A NEW PACE FOR ACQUISITION INTEGRATIONS

Moving Fast in a Slow Industry

High-growth HMS is challenging the traditionally calcified healthcare industry. Through its ability to create value from big data, this technology company returns billions of dollars back into the U.S. healthcare system, ultimately opening doors for more access to care.

But realizing their growth strategy has not been without its bumps.

At a period of long-plateaued revenue growth, HMS engaged Kotter to help build a movement toward the future vision and achieve breakthrough growth.  The partnership was forged around the belief that engaged employees drive better business results, and in turn deliver more and better outcomes for all stakeholders: customers, shareholders, patients, and communities.  Over the years that followed, HMS – with Kotter as their guide – practiced new ways of working, created a new language for change, and molded an energized work force into a newly adaptable and engaged culture.

A Legacy of Acquisition Potential Unfulfilled

Alongside the cultural and operational roadblocks that HMS faced was a lingering history of acquisitions that never fully delivered on their promised benefits.  Most integrations lost steam before the finish line, and as a result continued operating as mostly autonomous, siloed units of the business – at best missing opportunities for market growth and innovation, and at worst losing value.  In fact, a failed integration had resulted in HMS having stopped making acquisitions five years before partnering with Kotter. 

Changing the Integration Track Record

Once HMS had fully adopted the Kotter methodology – anchored in the core change principles, guided by a compelling vision of the future, and activated by constructs for new ways of working – they were positioned to re-engage in their long-paused acquisition strategy with confidence.

Over the course of their first two acquisitions since partnering with Kotter, HMS applied what they had learned, evolving and improving with each integration. There were some key elements of the approach that set these integrations on a new path:

• “Go slow to go fast” mentality established a sense of trust. HMS invested extra time at the very beginning of the integration (beginning with due diligence) getting to know the acquired company – its employees, its culture – deeply, and creating opportunities and experiences for the acquired employees to get to know HMS.
• Onboarding of new employees included a significant cultural component, socializing the key concepts and core change principles that HMS had adopted from Kotter.
• The value and cultural strengths the newly acquired companies brought to HMS was celebrated, not dismissed. The new companies were encouraged to join HMS in owning the future, connecting their purpose and strategy by answering the question, “What is possible today that wasn’t possible yesterday?”
• Cross-organizational teams – deployed to accelerate key strategic priorities of the integration – established ways of working and created wins and proof points of success within the first six months. These “Integration Accelerators” gave employees – particularly new leaders who were finding their way – something to grab on to.
• Employees from the newly acquired companies were invited to join projects that embodied the spirit of engagement, empowerment, volunteerism, and achievement that had become the hallmarks of HMS’ culture, allowing people to feel like they were part of HMS from day one. As an added driver, HMS teased ideas to create buzz so that people felt pulled to be included.
• The integration team engineered quick, positive impacts that were celebrated, reinforcing the HMS refrain of “what you do matters.”

The first integration was far more successful than any acquisition HMS had made, but the second acquisition raised the bar even higher.  The integration team set a goal of engaging 330 people in 60 days, and just 48 hours in had already reached 100 people.  The executive and integration teams reported the fastest, most successful integration in the history of the company, achieving strategic results in just six months. (And this was accomplished in the first half of 2020, as the world and workforce grappled with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.)