Changes of human resource practice between Warid Telecom and Airtel Bangladesh Limited after merger and acquisition

Abstract

Airtel Bangladesh Limited is a GSM-based cellular operator in Bangladesh. Airtel is the sixth mobile phone carrier to enter the Bangladesh market, and originally launched commercial operations under the brand name "Warid Telecom" on May 10, 2007. As an emerging company Airtel is doing extremely well. After the launch of Airtel in Bangladesh, the competition has become more strengthen among the telecom operators. Each of them is fighting to boost up its market share by offering new promotion and benefits to the customers. Since, all of the operators are offering almost same categories of products it has become a big challenge to retain the existing subscribers and acquisition of new customers. At this moment Airtel is trying to reach the customers with various promotional activities and is attempting to make their brand presence felt. Through their significant advances in Bangladesh, Airtel is moving ahead on the track to achieve their goals. The purpose of making this report was to know about the changes that took place when Airtel took over Warid in 2010. There were lots of rumors of this change from 2008 and it was more like an open secret within the organization that Airtel will merge with Warid. There were lots of tensions that people will lose their job, but Airtel’s business model is such that nobody lost their job, instead the IT officials got the chance to work in IBM, Ericsson and Siemens. So the change was good and employees adapted pretty nicely. However the Human Resource practices of Warid were very firm so employee dissatisfaction were pretty high, but Airtel put a lot of emphasis on employee engagement, so turnover rate in Airtel is almost zero.