2021 was a record-breaking year for mergers and acquisitions, with over 60,000 deals struck globally, Reuters reports. In almost every M&A deal, the HR department plays an important role in ensuring a successful transition, which, for the employees, begins with onboarding. And when it comes to acquisitions, seasoned HR leaders say that onboarding employees presents its own unique challenges.

When moving through an acquisition, HR leaders we interviewed said it’s important to first remember that employees aren’t choosing to join a new company, so these new team members deserve extra care. Onboarding during an acquisition must be done with more empathy, patience, and personalization than traditional onboarding, according to these HR professionals, who have gone through the acquisition process several times.

First off, using “acquiring” language when referring to employees can be off-putting, explained Nancy Hauge, chief people experience officer at business-automation software company Automation Anywhere, who’s helped with more than 30 mergers and acquisitions during her career. She told HR Brew that the language should focus more on “inviting” the new group to the company. “You have to be very conscious, very respectful of that individual,” Hauge said. “So that’s where lots of folks go wrong.”

Planning. Whether it’s a new hire or an employee joining through an acquisition, the onboarding process starts before the employee does. Tracy Tobin, chief people officer at Adswerve, a marketing firm in Denver, says that you must prepare across teams for acquired employees. “You’re trying to understand how everything is used, [as well as] the reliance on different HR technology,” Tobin said. “You have all of these processes and policies and vendors, and all of these things are how your business functions.”

Hauge says to look at the parts of the process you can automate so you can spend more time working on human interactions. Like traditional onboarding, tasks like payroll, benefits planning, and training can likely get done with technology.

Hauge said that in some situations she has been able to “offset 10% of my workload” through automation. “That’s the equivalent of four people just doing the administrative work full time,” she explained. “And that meant that we had a lot more individual one-on-one, face-to-face human engagement. And so we use that technology to make certain that we can put humans in front of all systems.” Keep reading here.—KP

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @Kris10Parisi on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Kristen for her number on Signal.

Most workplace-training videos are either sleepers, or worse—woefully out of date. But there’s at least one that’s both entertaining and speaks to the host of dilemmas facing the humble HR professional, and it’s a 42-year-old comedy in which Dolly Parton fantasizes about hog-tying her loathsome boss.

The entire HR field stands to learn something from 9 to 5. Starring Parton, alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, the whimsical romp masterfully brought issues including pay equity, flexible hours, and work-life balance to the fore back in 1980, the dawn of the “greed is good” era. Amid all the slapstick gags, it shows how the issues HR is dealing with today have been festering for decades.

The plot: After her husband leaves her for his secretary, Judy Bernly (Fonda) gets a job as a secretary at a soul-crushing corporation called Consolidated Companies. There, she meets fellow secretaries Violet Newstead (Tomlin) and Doralee Rhodes (Parton).

Doralee is the secretary of the office’s cartoon-villain boss, Vice President Frank Hart (Dabney Coleman), who aggressively harasses her, falling on top of her in one of the opening scenes.

When Judy and Violet learn that Frank has been harassing Doralee, and Violet is passed over for a promotion because she’s a woman, the trio blow off some steam by smoking a fatty that sets alight a workplace revenge fantasy. After a series of unlikely events, they actually do end up taking Frank hostage, and with Violet in charge at the office, they create a more equitable workplace and watch morale and productivity skyrocket. (As a consequence of their transformative efforts, Frank gets promoted…and transferred to Brazil.)

Its importance for HR: Though the film was released in 1980, the workplace revolution it depicts may not be all that different from what you’re trying to inspire in your own organization. The women, for example, establish on-site child care, still considered a progressive perk and offered by a select few companies such as Wisconsin’s AriensCo, a manufacturer of home and garden machinery, and Salt Lake City’s Recursion Pharmaceuticals. They also institute an equal-pay policy, one that stands out, since even today, women earn just 82 cents for every dollar men earn, according to Payscale’s 2022 State of the Gender Pay Gap report, which surveyed 933,000 US employees from January 2020 to January 2022. (Women earned 67 cents for every dollar men made in 1980, according to a Pew Research Center analysis.)

We’re not suggesting that you topple your workplace’s social order. (Or are we???) But if used as a reference point, 9 to 5 illustrates the progress HR has made toward achieving gender equity, and how far society still has to go. It’s a workplace training video unlike any other.—SB

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: Real-estate firms Compass and Redfin are cutting 10% and 8% of their respective workforces, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commision. (CNBC)

Quote: “Let go of this fantasy that you’re going to get your life in full working order and sort it all out.”—Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks, speaking about the workers struggling to claim control of the working (and living) hours that pass by in a blur (Wall Street Journal)

Read: Welcome to the so-called “Elon Musk School of Management,” where tech leaders remind the world that they’re the boss by castigating their employees on Twitter. (The Atlantic)

Oops, onboarding oversight: In this tight labor market, a bumpy onboarding process can often lead to an unexpected off-boarding. Check out HR Brew’s article covering cringeworthy workplace onboarding mishaps (and avoid their mistakes) here.