Bruce Tuckman's Model

Marriot International and Starwood Merger Group Project We will use Bruce Tuckman’s model for team development as a filter/map for progression throughout the merger and acquisition. Tuckman’s model has four stages forming, storming, norming, and performing.
The role of Human Resources during this merger are to identify and communicate the reasons behind the merger/acquisition; choose a leader and team to manager the process of change, assess the corporate culture, decide who stays and who goes; compare benefits compensation, contracts and decide on HR policies, (Lindberger, Judy). During the process of the merger between Marriot International and Starwood the CEO/President of Marriot Arne Sorenson wrote an open letter to Starwood Associates
in which he acknowledged Starwood’s success as a business in the hospitality industry and addressed why Marriot had chosen to acquire the company. This occurred during the forming stage in which leaders want to “share relevant information, provide structure, encourage dialogue, and develop a climate of trust and respect”, (Muse Stages of Team Building). In Sorenson’s letter, he stated “Putting People First” began with the founding of our company in 1927, when J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott opened an A&W Root Beer stand in Washington, D.C. The Marriott’s believed that if you take care of your associates, they will take care of the customers and those customers will come back. This has been a hallmark of our culture and central to how we have operated for nearly 90 years – through the best of times and through challenging ones, as well”, (Petri 2015). He also went on to say that “Delighting Guest” was the company’s top priority and that they would not be adversely impacted by the merger set the standard that customer service is priority above all else.
As the teams get to know each other and enter the storming stage there is sure to be tensions in all departments and groups as people naturally are resistant to change.
Sorenson also mentioned that worldwide there had been 150 plus meetings of departments to see where there could be potential reduction in an overlap of services, and to get to know each other and what everyone does. Carrie Bloom a Vice President of Communications for Starwood Properties stated in an email that, retention agreements were in place to help with employee engagement. While they don’t expect everyone to make it through the transition as some jobs may be eliminated, they are confident that the merger will result in new opportunities for many existing employees, (Soule,
Alexander).
Starwood Corp headquarters located in Stamford has already seen a reduction in employees and hiring. It was noted that there were now only 3 open positions at the Stamford location, while Marriot had 75 open positions posted on its Bethesda, MD location. It has also been noted that Marriot is looking for property in the Washington DC area, (Soule, Alexander).
The Human Resource team will have an active role during the Norming faze in which they will actively shape and create policy to help formulate the combined culture of the two companies. Additionally, HR should be working with team leaders to address concerns and give positive and constructive feedback to existing and newly formed teams. This is the time where as an organization we develop our culture and values and it needs to start at the top and disburse onto the rest of the organization. The shared values will become the filter we interact with each other daily and help form our corporate culture. head of the Payroll Department, and after meeting with other leaders in our group, we were able to design a plan that we felt would work to the benefit of the newly merged companies and our department. As with all changes, there have been some challenges, but we expected that to occur (Ting, 2016). When combining two large entities who have operated differently and as their own companies for such a long time, it has been a challenge to bring Starwood under the umbrella of Marriott International, but we have persevered and we have built a stronger Payroll Department because of the challenges that we’ve been able to work through. In building the newly combined Payroll Department, the two teams have been through every stage of Tuckman’s model – Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing (Mind Tools, n.d.). The road has not been an easy one, but we’re finally getting into the stage of Performing, which is the happy place. together. During this initial stage, it was important for our managers to be very hands on to help our employees understand how they needed to go forward (Mind Tools, n.d.). It’s somewhat of an exciting stage, as employees from both sides had the opportunity to form new relationships and gain different perspectives on the work at hand. As Leadership, we held back from introducing any new initiatives, as this is a very delicate stage in the process. After a couple of months, around May or June, the team moved into the Storming stage, where employees were not getting along as well. They were differing on how to do various processes, and feeling uncertain about how management was handling the issues at hand. This posed some problems in the department, and unfortunately, we lost a few staff in the whirlwind. They were having some trouble adjusting to the new environment, but we did expect that this could occur. Our management team worked non-stop to keep our employees motivated during this time, and we could keep much of our key staff intact. We started to slowly introduce a new initiative, but realized that we weren’t quite ready for that yet. There were still issues to work out amongst our groups. Our team then moved into the Norming stage, and things began to feel more stable. Our staff learned to appreciate their differences in how they perform work, and were even able to help each other to realize better flow and processes to complete the work that needed to be done. It was refreshing to enter this stage, as it became fun to come up with new ways and ideas to make our department run more efficiently and effectively. In Payroll, we don’t have the luxury of being relaxed for too long. People are dependent upon receiving their pay, so it was important that we begin to implement some of the new processes that we had designed to merge the corporations. We had a couple of setbacks as we settled into a new way of working, but we could smooth things out quickly and keep everyone motivated in the process. Finally, our team has just recently progressed into the Performing stage, where we have been exploring new processes and reaching our department goals as we forge ahead. We could implement much of what we had planned, but we also realized that some of our goals would need to be postponed as we worked toward building a stronger team. We made the tough decisions at the beginning of the merger, to look at both companies and figure out if we needed to streamline, because of any redundancies in roles, and determine if it was necessary to eliminate any roles or move people into different areas of work.
Thankfully, the need was not there to have to eliminate any positions or lay off any staff. We could keep all staff on board, which was the team goal early goal. We examined benefit costs per employee, and whether the merger would cause an increase in company subsidy for each employee, which would take away from the profit margins. After careful review of what both companies had to offer, we realized that the benefits package offered by Marriott International was more substantial and a better deal for both employees and the company. Although the employee out-of-pocket cost would slightly increase, the increase was not significant enough to make much of a difference to the staff, considering the extra benefits that would be accessible to them going forward. We found that we would not be able to merge and combine everything overnight, but rather over time. We are still working through each phase of the merger, but our employees are in a place where they feel stable, and they are excited about what the future holds for our newly combined
company.

The focus in our reservations department has been retention and training and development. CEO Sorenson was clear in his open letter to Starwood employees that as a company we were committed to a seamless customer experience during our transition. In order to deliver on that expectation. We will incorporate a blended style of learning as we will combine face to face instruction with computer mediated instruction. This was identified as the most effective way of facilitating training during stage 3, Norming using Bruce Tuckman’s model, (Mind Tools), The employees will be trained to use our new computer reservations system to encompass all our properties to enable all staff to book reservations for any of our properties. The training provided will help employees feel secure in their roles and contribute to a cohesive team by sharing knowledge from both organizations. To ensure retention of reservation associates during the transition traditional retention agreements would be utilized within the department.