As a 55-year-old tech company, Zebra Technologies has been through its share of mergers and acquisitions. Its first acquisitions were in the 1980s, and in the late 1990s and early 2000s the company purchased a string of small technology firms, and continued adding to its portfolio of hardware and software makers in the 2010s. Notably, Zebra acquired the Enterprise business from Motorola Solutions in 2014. It’s been active in the 2020s too, most recently acquiring Matrox Imaging in 2022.

Mergers and acquisitions are inherently disruptive to employees, no matter how smooth the financial transaction. Melissa Luff Loizides, Zebra’s VP of talent for the last 10 years, has been deliberate in integrating and consolidating the cultures of the teams that merge. Loizides spoke in a fireside at From Day One’s August virtual conference on gaining better insight into workers needs and ambition.

Rather than overriding one culture with another, her goal is to “identify a culture that would really be representative of the Zebra and of the newly acquired entities together,” she said. “That enables us to go on a journey together and think about how we want to show up and operate with one another. We want to succeed as one. We want to assume positive intent. Those are often hard things to do, especially in corporate settings where there are competing priorities, everybody is resource-constrained, and everybody’s trying to get the best results.”

Loizides knows first-hand what it’s like to be on the acquired side; she herself was part of a company absorbed by Zebra years ago. She shows up in the earliest days of diligence, getting to know the leadership teams of the company being acquired. People managers were particularly influential in those early days, she pointed out. They set the tone for the company culture. Loizides called them the “north stars” for the rest of the workforce. For better or worse, “the shadow you cast as a leader who is experiencing their own challenges, that can very easily cascade.”

The company has been able to maintain some cultural momentum throughout years of change. Zebra has been named a Great Place to Work, with 86% of employees saying that the company is a great place to be. Zebra was also named one of Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators in 2023, and it’s a best place to work for people with disabilities, according to the 2024 Disability Equality Index.

Loizides credits the company’s employees with these achievements. A significant part of Zebra’s culture-building is built on consistent employee feedback and individual contributions, she said. “Some of those awards, and many others, are received because of the feedback of our employees. And that certainly says a lot about corporate recognition. [Employees] want to be a part of an organization that’s going to recognize them and create a culture where they want to come to work every day.”

Having a firmly established culture helped the company through a CEO transition last year. “We felt really grounded in the culture that existed,” Loizides said of the environment at the time. The effects of Covid really challenged the workforce, and the leadership team paid closer attention and commitment of additional resources to employees’ well-being. The leadership team also decided to focus on refreshing the company values. 

Though innovation, agility, and working as a team have long been a part of Zebra’s values, the company added new ones: thinking and acting customer-first and making a positive impact on the global community and environment. “With those refreshed values, we could re-enhance and reinvigorate while continuing to cherish some of the things that we already identify as part of our culture.”

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Quartz, Fast Company, and Digiday’s Worklife.