Takeaways from the integration journey at Satalia
Earlier this year, Satalia Lithuania fully integrated into the Satalia family after the London-based AI system developer acquired the Lithuanian company in 2019. Just like in every integration project, bringing two companies together required some effort to account for the change and uncertainty in the day-to-day lives of the staff. This experience collected from the integration process is particularly useful in the face of the unprecedented lockdown period, where the merger had to be carried out while adjusting for an unusual pandemic-related situation.
Last spring, Satalia acquired Data Dog, a Lithuanian development company with more than 40 software developers, project managers, data scientists, and other specialists. The acquisition was the fruitful result of 5 years of cooperation, where the two companies joined forces in a partnership capacity to create AI-based products and systems for companies in the retail, hospitality, real estate, and other sectors. It took a year, but the integration of the companies’ processes, HR, communication, and culture has finally been completed.
Domas Janickas, the manager of Satalia Lithuania, says that the result of this process was a new entity with new culture and processes, noticeably different from what the two sides of the new company used to be. The integration wasn’t a simple matter of the acquired company flipping the switch and adopting their new owner’s way of doing things. Instead, the process involved an in-depth mix-and-match adventure, where the companies took what worked for them historically and mashed it together to create the new practices.
The new processes also survived a real trial by fire when COVID-19 hit the world, forcing an unwelcome stress test on the freshly developed practices at the new company. Fortunately, the result of the work done by the integration team stood up to this unexpected challenge and proved its value.
“One of the completed integration objectives that paid off in a major way for us was the creation of remote work guidelines,” said D. Janickas. “Remote work in London and other Satalia locations was very common but not widely adopted in Kaunas. You could say that every company with locations in different cities or even countries works “remotely”, but the truth is that these companies rarely have clearly established guidelines and procedures for remote work, not to mention the fact that the employees aren’t all informed on how to use them. As part of our integration homework, we had to figure out a clear way to organize remote work. We are now reaping the rewards.”
Our remote work policies are valuable in a standalone capacity. With that said, the fact that our employees helped shape them in a major way acts as a value multiplier. After all, people have a tendency to protect, follow, and admire something they create. With plenty of input in the form of ideas from non-managing employees, the work council, and basically everyone working at the company, the staff is much more invested in making the whole thing work.
During our integration process, we also learned some major lessons about internal communication. One of the most important of them all, according to D. Janickas, is that there can never be “too much” communication. Discussing daily tasks, the atmosphere at work and simple small talk is just as important as discussing the official direction of the company, innovation efforts, and other long-term big-brain matters.
“We have revamped our communication channels and the approach to communication during the integration process,” said D. Janickas. “We emphasized employee engagement, informal communication, and down to earth chats. We figured out that the most important internal communication at a company happens by the coffee machine or at the local smoking spot, not during announcements from top management. While our Lithuanian office was quite used to the informal communication, it had to adopt some of the high-level bits from the Brits. At the same time, our London and other international colleagues were encouraged to communicate less formally. In the end, we learned from each other and came out of it better off. The important takeaway is that colleagues feel more certain and engaged with frequent, human, and, most importantly, clear communication.”
Satalia also found that forming a dedicated integration team paid off in a major way when it came to ensuring that the sum became greater than its parts. This team, filled by colleagues from all Satalia locations, thoroughly analyzed processes from all locations, and looked at what worked best, mixing and matching to create the strongest end result.
“Clearly, the new processes would have been ineffective at best if we used a top-down approach,” said D. Janickas. “The integration team constantly consulted other teams and colleagues most affected by the process they were working on at the time. The team was also responsible for ensuring that all relevant parties were clearly informed about what was going on, everyone knew which projects were completed and which were ongoing, making the whole integration process as transparent and clear as possible. With active participation from the Satalia community, we snagged several big wins: the new processes feel different but also somewhat familiar to everyone, regardless of location, while also accounting for the new reality of working at Satalia, which involves cooperation with people living in different parts of Europe and taking advantage of flexible work hours.”
Currently, more than 100 people work at Satalia from London, Kaunas, Vienna, Athens, and Luxembourg.
