How SAIC kicked off the Unisys Federal integration amid the coronavirus pandemic

How do you kick off integration activities after closing a $1.2 billion acquisition in the middle of a pandemic?

One of the first things you do is cancel the catering for what was a planned, in-person all hands meeting led by your CEO.

Science Applications International Corp. went ahead with a live, all-hands meeting Monday morning to kick off the integration of Unisys Federal but it was not in person. Nearly all of the executive presenters were at home.

SAIC planned to take its senior leadership team to the main office of Unisys Federal in Reston, Virginia to welcome their employees to the company.

About 150 were expected at the event. But SAIC went all-virtual because of the ever-expanding impact of the coronavirus.

“We planned an in-person all hands town all with [SAIC CEO] Nazzic Keene and other leaders going over to Unisys Federal, but we shifted to a virtual meeting,” said Josh Jackson, executive vice president and general manager. Jackson was one of the presenters and was at home for meeting.

“We had virtual presentations from multiple locations and responded to Q&A from multiple locations as well,” he said.

There is one silver lining to the virtual meeting, according to Jackson, who thinks the company captured more questions from the new employees than perhaps they do typically.

There was always going to be a virtual component to the all-hands because of the nature of government contracting, where you operate out of multiple locations and have employees working on customer sites, said Lauren Presti, SAIC public relations lead.

For the virtual all-hands, 1,300 of Unisys Federal’s 2,000 employees tuned it. “We are happy with the attendance,” Presti said.

“We have a regular cadence of virtual meetings,” she added. “Luckily, this wasn’t our first time, so we didn’t have to start from scratch and scramble.”