M&A culture interview guide: questions and structure

This M&A culture interview guide helps you find out how people in both companies actually make decisions, get work done and react to the deal, in their own words. It takes about 25 minutes per person and has seven short sections, each with open questions and follow-up probes. Run it in the first weeks after close, with the same questions in the acquired company and the acquirer, so you can compare the two.

Who should you interview for an M&A culture assessment, and when?

Interview across levels and functions in both companies. Leadership interviews tell you how the business is meant to run. The people who load the lorries, close the month and answer the phones tell you how it does run. If you can only reach a sample, cover every site and every function that the integration will touch, and include supervisors, because they feel changes to decision rights first.

Timing is set by the deal. Before signing you rarely get access to employees below the top team, so the pre-close work relies on documents and management sessions, as our post on cultural due diligence explains. Once the deal closes, run the first round within the first month. A second round around Day 90 shows whether your integration decisions landed. Our first 100 days survey guide has a timing plan you can pair with this one.

There is a reason to move quickly. SHRM’s toolkit on the people side of M&A says deals often create uncertainty about job security, decision-making authority, career continuity and cultural fit, and that retention risk rises sharply during mergers. It also notes that behaviour, such as people pulling back from decisions or avoiding plans for the future, often warns you earlier than anything people say about leaving.

The M&A culture interview guide

Ask for stories about specific events. “How are decisions made here?” gets the official answer. “Tell me about the last decision you had to wait for” gets what happened. Each section lists the main questions and the probes to use when an answer is short or general.

1. Opening (2 minutes)

1. Can you tell me briefly what your role is and how long you’ve been here?

Before this, say who will see the answers and in what form, and that there are no right answers. If people think the interview is a quiet performance review, they will describe the culture they think you want.

2. A normal week (4 minutes)

1. Walk me through a normal week. Where does most of your time go?
2. Who do you rely on most to get your work done?

Follow up with:

• When that person is away, what happens?
• Which meeting, report or spreadsheet would you miss most if it disappeared?

3. Decisions (5 minutes)

1. Tell me about the last time you needed someone’s approval to do something. What was it, and how long did it take?
2. What can you decide on your own without asking anyone?
3. When you disagree with a decision from above, what do you do?

Follow up with:

• Who actually made the call in the end?
• Was that quick or slow, compared with what you’d expect?
• Has anything about who approves your work changed since the deal?

4. When things go wrong (4 minutes)

1. Think of a recent mistake or problem in your team. What happened next?
2. What happens to someone who raises a problem early?

Follow up with:

• Who found out, and how?
• Would people here have raised it sooner or later than that?

5. What to keep (4 minutes)

1. What is it about working here that a new owner should be careful not to break?
2. What gets someone praised or promoted here?

Follow up with:

• Can you give me an example of someone who got recognised for that?
• Is that written down anywhere, or just understood?

6. The deal (4 minutes)

1. What have you heard about the other company, and from whom?
2. What is the one thing you most want to know about what happens next?
3. What would make the next year a good one for you here?

Follow up with:

• How much of that have you heard officially, and how much in the corridor?
• Is that something your colleagues are talking about too?

7. Close (2 minutes)

1. Is there anything we haven’t asked that the integration team should hear?

How do you run an M&A culture interview: a person or an AI interviewer?

A person works well for the top team and a few dozen managers. A skilled interviewer reads hesitation and changes course. The limits are cost and reach: consultants rarely get past the management layer, and employees may be guarded with someone from the acquiring side.

An AI interviewer lets you put the same guide to everyone at once. Spradley runs it as one-on-one AI interviews by text or voice. Invitations go out by email or Slack, people answer on their own phone or computer in their own time, and the interviewer asks follow-up questions on each answer, much like the probes above. Our merger integration page shows how teams use it in the first 100 days.

Whichever you use, keep the wording identical across both companies. If the acquirer’s staff hear “How do decisions get made?” and the target’s staff hear “How bureaucratic is it here?”, you can’t compare the answers.

How do you analyse culture interview answers into themes?

Read for patterns, then count them. A practical sequence:

1. Read 15 to 20 interviews from each company before coding anything, and note recurring phrases.
2. Group answers into themes under the guide’s sections: decision speed, who holds authority, response to mistakes, what people value, deal worries.
3. For each theme, note how often it comes up in each company and pick two or three quotes that show it plainly.
4. Put the two companies side by side. The differences that will hurt are usually in sections 3 and 4.
5. Split by department and site. A finance team and a warehouse in the same company may differ more than the two companies do.

Never report on a group so small that people can be picked out. A minimum of five is a common floor, and it is the one Spradley uses for numbers and ratings. Written findings go through a privacy judge instead. Then turn each finding into a decision with an owner, such as “Site managers keep spending authority up to the current limit until Q3.”

Adapt it

• For a carve-out, replace section 6 with questions on what people lose from the former parent: shared services, systems, colleagues.
• For a private equity bolt-on, add a question in section 3 on how the founder or owner made decisions, since that habit often lasts after the sale.
• For a second round at Day 90, keep sections 3 to 5 the same so you can compare, and change section 6 to ask what has changed since the first round.
• For frontline staff on shifts, cut to sections 2, 3, 6 and 7 and aim for ten minutes.

Frequently asked questions

Key terms

Culture interview

A structured conversation that asks people for specific examples of how decisions, mistakes and everyday work are handled, so culture can be described from behaviour.

Probe

A follow-up question that asks for an example, a name or a sequence of events when the first answer is short or general.

Decision rights

Who can approve what, such as a hire, a price change or a purchase, and up to what limit.

AI-moderated interview

A one-on-one interview in which software asks the questions and follow-ups, by text or voice, and the answers are analysed afterwards.

Minimum group size

The smallest number of people a result can be shown for, so no individual can be identified. Five is a common floor.