Deloitte & Touche: Integrating Arthur Andersen

In 2002, approximately 1,000 Arthur Andersen employees joined Deloitte & Touche, effectively creating the largest professional services organization in Canada. The combined entity employed 6,600 people and represented annual billings of over $1 billion. A co-chair for the national integration team was faced with a huge challenge: to develop a company-wide plan to create support materials to aid the Deloitte staff in integrating the Andersen staff in the organization. The integration process was monitored through a monthly survey and would be used by the team to benchmark unit to unit over time, and to take remedial action at specific stages if the integration goals were not attained. The most recent survey indicated that Deloitte employees felt that in the company's haste to finalize the deal with Andersen, it was forgetting about its own employees. Some within the Deloitte organization did not understand the amount of attention given to Andersen employees, whom they viewed as "damaged goods." The co-chair and integration team must determine the best way to deal with the feedback and the cultural differences that are surfacing.