The M&A market entered 2026 with serious momentum. One research group estimates that 2025 was the second-highest year for deal activity on record, with value up 40% to approximately $4.9 trillion globally. U.S.-target deal volume reached $2.3 trillion, up 49% from 2024. Megadeals worth $5 billion or more surged 76% year-over-year, and 41% of CEOs surveyed by PwC plan to pursue a major acquisition within three years.
The appetite is there. The execution track record is not. An analysis of 40,000 deals over four decades found that 70-75% of acquisitions fail to meet their objectives, with large-target integrations particularly prone to failure because of the complexity involved in reassigning employees, changing control structures, and unifying operating procedures. Harvard Business School research places the failure range even higher, at 70-90%.
The financial models behind these deals account for synergy capture, cost reduction, and revenue growth. They rarely account for the employee experience variables that determine whether those outcomes materialize: trust, decision clarity, role certainty, and cultural alignment. Perceptyx’s new Mergers & Acquisitions Guidebook addresses that gap directly.
Employees don’t experience a merger through deal decks or integration project plans. They experience it through everyday signals: who makes decisions now, what gets explained and what doesn’t, which legacy norms survive, and whether the combined organization feels worth committing to.
Perceptyx defines engagement as the degree to which employees anticipate success — for the business, for customers, and for their own careers. During integration, all three dimensions come under pressure simultaneously. The guidebook outlines five “Moments That Matter” where that pressure is highest and where listening has the greatest impact on outcomes:
Talent acquisition and onboarding — Recruiting during integration signals how the combined organization handles uncertainty. New hires form impressions of culture within days, and those impressions are difficult to revise.
Belonging and identity formation — Employees who feel they belong to the new organization are more than 3x as likely to say they intend to stay. Perceptyx data shows that when pulsed within 60 days of deal close, fewer than 45% of acquired employees identify with the combined company. By 12-18 months, that figure can reach 80%, but only if leaders actively build shared identity rather than assuming it will form on its own.
Organizational restructuring — Role changes, reporting line shifts, and process redesigns carry high emotional weight. Only 60% of individual contributors and 72% of managers report feeling supported in adapting to change, which compounds the difficulty of absorbing restructuring on top of normal workload.
Workload and ways of working — Integration adds work before it removes it. Employees run dual systems, attend more meetings, and absorb ambiguity. Burnout risk accelerates during this phase, and listening data can flag friction points before they translate into attrition.
Resignations and exits — Employees rarely leave on announcement day. Exits rise when employees lose confidence in their future at the combined company. Targeted retention listening at months 3, 6, and 9 for critical roles can surface flight risk before it materializes in a resignation letter.
Perceptyx research shows a direct relationship between leadership trust and integration outcomes. Employees who trust senior leaders are 10x more likely to report full engagement. During M&A, trust is built or lost through specific, observable leadership behaviors: how clearly leaders communicate the rationale for change, how quickly they resolve ambiguity around roles and reporting structures, and whether they respond visibly to employee feedback.
The guidebook applies the SCARF framework (Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness) to M&A contexts, helping integration leaders identify the specific threat signals employees experience during each phase. When an employee’s sense of status drops because their title changed, or their autonomy shrinks because approval processes doubled, or fairness perceptions erode because one legacy group appears favored, those signals predict disengagement well before it shows up in productivity metrics or turnover data.
The data shows that employees who perceive cultural congruence with the combined organization are 3.5x more likely to remain at 18 months. Culture mapping, using tools like the Competing Values Framework, gives leaders a structured way to identify where legacy cultures differ on dimensions like flexibility vs. stability and internal vs. external focus, and to design integration choices that acknowledge those differences rather than overriding them with generic “we’re all one team” messaging.
The guidebook outlines a maturity model for post-merger listening that moves from reactive (surveying once after close) to proactive (building a multi-channel signal system that matches deal risk over time). The practical components include:
Cadence matched to deal phase: Early risk lives in uncertainty and trust. Mid-stage risk lives in friction, decision speed, and role ambiguity. Late-stage risk lives in belonging, career confidence, and identity. Each phase calls for different listening content and different response timelines.
Short, targeted pulses: The guidebook recommends keeping early pulses to 10-15 items plus one open comment prompt, expanding only after the organization has demonstrated that feedback leads to visible action. Closing the loop is what converts listening from a monitoring exercise into a trust-building one.
Multi-stakeholder question design: Senior leaders, HR leaders, managers, and frontline employees each experience integration differently. The guidebook provides tailored question sets for each group, reflecting the distinct risk signals each population surfaces.
Integration of listening with action enablement: Perceptyx solutions like Activate help managers translate survey results into specific next steps without waiting for a formal action-planning cycle. During integration, speed matters: every week of delay in addressing friction reduces net present value and erodes the confidence employees need to execute.
Organizations like Huntington Bank, which used Perceptyx to power multi-channel listening from legal day one through full systems conversion during its merger with TCF Bank, demonstrate what this looks like in practice. The listening data pinpointed low-engagement hotspots among former TCF employees and enabled targeted interventions that resolved adjustment challenges before they drove attrition.
The 2025 M&A surge means thousands of organizations are entering or currently navigating post-merger integration. One consultancy's analysis noted that many of the year’s largest deals were led by “infrequent acquirers” making transformative bets, which means these organizations may lack established integration playbooks and are operating at higher risk.
For integration leaders building or refining their approach, the Perceptyx Mergers & Acquisitions Guidebook provides a research-backed framework covering best practices, timing guidance, stakeholder-specific question sets, sample listening content, and a maturity model for building integration listening into a sustained organizational capability. Whether your organization is preparing for a first acquisition or managing back-to-back deals, the guidebook is designed to help leaders detect execution drag early and respond with confidence.
To learn how Perceptyx helps organizations protect deal value through employee listening, schedule a demo with a member of our team.