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After the plans related to the integration had been formulated after spending more than eight months
with the most skilled and competent personnel, the real issues were anticipated when the plan was to
be executed in the organization.

The issues related to implementation were;

1.V Acceptance of the new strategies without any change by all the employees
2.V Cultural differences between the pre-merger companies
3.V Workforce diversity in terms of their number i.e. 15,500, different leadership styles, job-
perception, working environment, etc.
4.V After merger unevenly balanced teams, which could have led to slow cultural integration
because of unnatural diversity in opinions, unhealthy tensions among the team members and
failure to implement the new strategies and following the older ones. These differences and
gaps between the old strategies and new ones are referred as ͞hotspots͟

For implementing the plan, a top down approach was adoptedto speed up the implementation in order
to stay in technology-oriented industry. The reason behind newly formulated strategies was explained
so as to make the employees understand the new policies and the relevant roles of employees and
leaders in the organization according to the requirement of newly formulated strategies.

In order to cover the cultural gap, a Cultural Integration Team (CIT) within the clean room was
formulated which was responsible to create a new culture that amalgamated the best of both the pre-
merger companies. In order to create this new culture

V CIT involved a large proportion of employees so that the new culture can be adopted easily.
V CIT also developed an orientation project under the name of Fast Start(in which all the
employees had to participate). The main purpose of this project was to make the workforce
understand the new business model of the company along with their relevant roles and
responsibilities in the organization.
V The team alsohelped the employees to understand the new culture through web pages like HR
News @ HP and The New HP along with the Ask Me button, Culture in Action stories and Virtual
culture Community.

In order to resolve the issues of unbalanced number of team members, the clean room set up the
principle of formulating evenly balanced team which could have a ratio of 50/50 or 40/60.

To resolve the hotspots, a sub-group of clean room also met weekly to discuss the progress of the
company͛s integration plan. Moreover feedback from ͞Ask Me͟ also helped to identify the position of
the integration plan implementation.

Although identification of hotspots is crucial but once identified, the dedicated teams try to resolve
them at their best by bringing in new innovative corporate programs.