Mindpool spoke to Esben Wille Lunde, COO at Simple Solution – a digital agency specializing in web development, digital marketing, and IT. Crucial to the journey of Simple Solution is the fact that this organization acquired four smaller IT companies last year. This led to some fruitful conversation regarding the various means utilized in order to ensure all employees remained aligned at the end of the day, and specifically how Mindpool played a part in this process. 

With a background in startups, Esben was highly aware of the challenges entailing an acquisition at such a high level, hence why he sought out a software to help alleviate some of the biggest pain points in this organizational transformation – sparking the curiosity in Mindpool’s collective intelligence platform. 

The arduous task of acquisition 

Acquisitions are notoriously known for being cumbersome when it comes to the integration of a plethora of human assets, technologies, corporate cultures, and financial realities. The actual process of the integration of all of these various functions is incredibly resource-intensive and requires an unprecedented amount of attention to detail – and this attention cannot solely be focused on the legal, technological, or financial technicalities of the acquisition, but also needs to be channeled into the principal humans at stake, the employees. 

This was something that Esben was acutely aware of, which is why he decided to explore the various options available to give employees the platform they needed in order to share their collective feedback, both throughout and after the acquisition itself. As he mentions:

This was particularly relevant for us because, last year, we acquired four smaller IT companies, and so I wanted to create a safe platform for the existing employees as well as the new employees to give feedback anonymously. We also wanted to try to establish more of a collective and connected set of feedback. This is because when you acquire companies, the owner of the old company obviously made a decision, but not necessarily the employees themselves – it is not a given that they automatically agree with the decision that was made. In addition to one-on-one feedback with everybody, I also wanted to utilize Mindpool’s anonymous platform to see if it would introduce a new perspective for us.

As elucidated here, Mindpool was a necessary platform for Simple Solution in order to prevent any unexpected or adverse consequences of the acquisition. But a platform of expression was not the only benefit for Esben, it was also about the efficacy facilitated through utilizing such a platform. A platform in and of itself is not necessarily needed to simply communicate. HOWEVER, an intelligent platform is certainly needed to enable, aggregate, process, and disseminate this human intelligence – in a much more efficient manner than managers simply sitting with several different sets of feedback from one-on-one sessions with employees. That’s where Mindpool comes in handy. 

Having tried an array of various other methods of collecting employee feedback prior, Esben made the following comment: 

We used to do old-school questionnaires at Simple Solution, with printed out surveys which employees had to fill out, fold together and slip into a box – a very manual process. That was extremely time-consuming and confusing when you sit there at the end of the day trying to get an overview of all  the answers as such. This is especially the case if you don’t have a clear vision at the start of this kind of manual survey, it can actually be a huge task trying to visualize or learn from the answers you get back. This kind of survey easily ends up becoming more of a gesture than a means for making practical improvements. 

As aforementioned, communicating is something that anyone can do, but which manager can single-handedly collect, process, and convert all employee insights into something actionable that can succinctly and successfully drive organizational transformation? On top of that, imagine going through this arduous process for all of the employees in not just one company, but the four others acquired. An intelligent software is pivotal in simplifying this process of harnessing employee-driven business insights. 

Alleviating the task of acquisition

Ultimately, Mindpool was a helping hand for Simple Solution in facilitating a seamless acquisition that would be sustainable and enduring. As Esben says:

For us, Mindpoool was valuable in giving employees the platform to give honest feedback and also sending out a clear message that we actually are interested in what they have to say. Despite being really busy with the new employees and customers, getting feedback was still a high priority for us in order to facilitate this change as smoothly as possible. 

Going above and beyond the classic scenario of simply claiming to listen to employees was, and still is, evidently a priority for Esben. To be able to put the different pieces of the puzzle together and facilitate a coherent set of feedback to incorporate was the challenge mastered in this case. 

Mindpool would like to extend a warm thank you to Esben Wille Lunde, COO at Simple Solution, for contributing his thoughts on the use of the Mindpool platform in the duration of the aforementioned acquisition! If you want to learn more about Simple Solution, reach out to Esben!

If you want to follow the Mindpool journey, which we certainly hope you will do, make sure to stay updated with our blog posts, newsletters, and social media platforms – we want to keep you as informed as possible about the world of collective intelligence and all the benefits that come with this. 

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