The new restructuring playbook: Repair the culture

restructuring. It is often said that experiencing culture is like breathing good air: you tend to notice it only when something is not right.

Uncertain business contexts, such as restructuring, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), can put organisational culture at a difficult inflection point. Structural changes can happen relatively quickly, with organisations merging teams, changing reporting lines, redefining roles, or bringing in new leadership.

HR plays a critical role in addressing the cultural friction that arises in such crucial contexts through perception management, helping teams unlearn outdated behaviours, and adapting to new ways of working. Yet much of this work is difficult to quantify and rarely finds a place in conventional performance metrics.

As part of ’s October editorial series, ‘The organisational advantage: Beyond strategy and structure,’ this story explores the behind-the-scenes work done by the HR leaders in realigning the organisational culture during the restructuring.

According to Kartik Rao, Chief People Officer, Vahan, most restructuring is still designed with a 20th-century tool: the organisation chart. It tells who reports to whom, but not how work actually moves, who people trust, or where the organisation will quietly break. Restructuring is a trust event disguised as a cost event.

Mridul Shreevastava, Chief Human Resources Officer, TARC India, pointed out that people always ask themselves whether they are safe, whether they still matter, and whether the organisation will be fair. The interventions that answer those questions are rarely visible in a board presentation.

The most underrated decision in any restructuring is the order in which people hear the news. The HR team made it a rule that line managers were briefed first, usually a day or two before the wider announcement. They got a conversation guide, answers to the questions employees were likely to ask, and permission to say, “I don’t know yet, but I will find out.”

Adding capability before complexity

Srichakra Polyplast opted for a phased approach in the ongoing integration with Safar Ecopet. The first priority was to understand Safar as it existed, including its people, operating practices, reporting structures, organisational dynamics, strengths and challenges before determining where Srichakra’s systems, processes and people practices could add value.

One area where this became particularly important was technology adoption. Teams at the facility had been working across different systems, and introducing new software and processes, which required more than technical implementation. “Our IT Head, Bala Krishna Adusumilli, and his team spent significant time at the Safar facility supporting the SAP rollout, working directly with users to understand adoption challenges and address issues as they emerged,” said Sravanthi Kurra, Head – HR, Srichakra Polyplast.

This on-ground involvement also improved coordination within teams and across functions as people gained greater clarity on processes and whom to approach for support.

Role-focused interventions

When Vahan restructured a core function, roles were rewritten around jobs to be done. Within weeks, a two-track career path was launched, one for individual contributors and one for people managers. While the structure changed, the HR team made sure that the path did not disappear.

One of the reasons for post-restructuring burnout is orphaned work. Even after roles are removed, the tasks remain and land silently on whoever is left. “We ran structured ‘stop, simplify, shift’ sessions with each function. Teams listed what they would stop doing, what could be simplified, and what genuinely needed to move to someone else,” said Mridul.

Capability transfer has been another important part of the integration. Experienced personnel from Srichakra’s plants have worked alongside Safar’s teams to provide technical guidance, share operating knowledge, and strengthen capabilities on the ground.

The same approach has extended across functions. “Our commercial and marketing teams, for instance, have been supporting Safar’s customer and brand relationships while creating linkages between its production capabilities and Srichakra’s ecosystem. Many of these interventions do not immediately appear on a business dashboard, but they help reduce friction by making integration collaborative rather than simply structural,” Kurra said.

Inclusion and networking intervention

In Rao’s previous career at an FMCG conglomerate that acquired several brands, the HR team ran an organisational network analysis (ONA). At headcount level, the organisation looked balanced, with 54 percent men and 46 percent women. But the network told a different story. Men mostly interacted with men, and women with women. Structure was partly the cause. Business units had drifted into gendered shapes with 74 percent men and 64 percent women, and 88 percent of conversations stayed inside the unit.

Figuring out that the network problem cannot be fixed with a hiring target, the HR team designed connections into the structure with mixed pods across units, changed champions from every group, and checked exit decisions to make sure that people who acted as bridges were not removed.

Rao pointed out that the organisation chart may tell who reports to whom.

“It’s the network that tells who listens to whom. Restructure the second, and the first follows,” he said.

The ONA further validated this statement. Though two-thirds of the leaders showed up as influencers, they were only 12 percent of the organisation. Around 51 percent (112 people) were informal influencers, most without big titles.

“A few people held the wiring, and sentiment travels through influence. About 13 percent of employees carried 46 percent of all connectivity, which revealed that roles that look redundant on a spreadsheet can be structurally critical in the network. It was also observed that over 23 highly influential people were detractors,” Rao said.

Tracking trust

Top performers are usually poached when the restructuring news spreads. Before letting that happen, Mridul and his team focused on building trust through one-on-one stay conversations with critical talents that addressed their future role, growth, and concerns. “Very often, a clear sense of where they fit in the new structure mattered more to people than money,” Mridul shared.

Also, dignified exits were ensured for the employees leaving the firm. “Conversations were held in person and in private, never by email. Separation support went beyond the statutory minimum wherever possible, including continued medical cover and outplacement help,” Mridul said.

This isn’t a softer approach but a strategic intervention, because survivors would watch closely and decide how much discretionary effort to be given based on how their colleagues were treated on the way out.

Rao shared as attrition is a lagging indicator, the firm decided to track ‘trust’ through short manager-level pulses and regretted attrition by cohort. “Clarity (about what restructuring meant to them) moved first, visible in pulse scores within 4 to 6 weeks. Trust networks took a quarter or two to re-knit across the new lines,” he said.

The real test was the second wave: high performers who quietly leave three to six months after the restructuring announcement haven’t left.

“Culture takes 12 to 18 months to feel like ‘this is how we work now.’ And the dashboards catch up last,” Rao shared.

Closing the loop faster

Commenting on an M&A assignment that she led in one of her previous assignments, Gauri Das, Head HR & CSR, India Factoring and Finance Solutions, shared that people naturally have questions that do not always surface in formal meetings: What does this change mean for me? How will decisions be made? Whose way of working will prevail? What happens to my role and my team?”

Das and team led multiple employee-connect mechanisms like open houses, skip-level meetings, cross-functional focus group discussions, and informal ‘Coffee with the MD’ conversations.

The objective was to understand what people were experiencing on the ground and identify friction points early. “The important part was closing the loop. If employees raised an issue, we either acted on it or explained why we could not. That built credibility. People did not necessarily expect every concern to be resolved, but they wanted to know that someone was listening,” Das said.

These conversations also helped leadership distinguish between genuine integration issues and anxiety created by incomplete information. Some concerns were addressed through a simple clarification. Others required changes in processes, roles, or ways of working.

The visible impact takes time

Post-restructuring patterns across industry revealed that even if deep cultural integration would take a longer period, the behavioural shifts were visible in the initial months

Mridul opined that culture repair takes time to adjust to the structural change, and HR leaders should be candid with their boards about this fact.

In his experience, the impact shows up in three waves.

The first 30 to 60 days would give signals that rarely reach a dashboard. Rumours died faster. Fewer grievances reached HR. And managers reported calmer team meetings. Questions from employees usually shift from “Am I next?” to “How will this work?”

The next three to six months would see stabilisation where regretted attrition flattens instead of spiking, trust in leadership begins to recover, and internal mobility picks up.

The next nine to 18 months would have a visible cultural shift where productivity holds or improves with leaner teams, and employee referrals return.

What changed first at Srichakra Polyplast was not necessarily a business metric, but the quality of interaction between the two organisations. During the SAP rollout, the IT team was able to identify adoption challenges directly from users rather than waiting for them to emerge later as system or process issues.

The HR team deliberately did not set a rigid timeline or wait for a single business metric to tell whether the integration was working. “Over the next two to three months, those early behavioural shifts began translating into more tangible improvements. In an integration, some of the most important early indicators can be qualitative: whether people are comfortable raising concerns, whether they seek support without hesitation, whether problems are identified earlier, and whether the teams begin to see the larger organisation as an enabler rather than simply another layer of control,” said Kurra.

For HR leaders, the challenge is to recognise these signals, communicate their significance to the business and make the value of this less visible work part of the larger conversation on organisational performance. As companies become more accustomed to restructuring, the role of HR is also evolving from managing the immediate disruption to shaping what comes after it.