Frontier Poised for Cultural Integration, Hiring Surge as Company Awaits FCC Response to Verizon Deal
Required state approvals in hand and anticipating a nod soon from the FCC, Frontier Communications hopes to close its acquisition of networks and long-distance business from Verizon as soon as June 30, a company spokesman said. Regardless of the timing, for the first 30 to 45 days after the closing, Frontier’s focus will be melding its company culture with Verizon’s, Steven Crosby, the company’s senior vice president for government and corporate affairs, told us. “Systems are very cut-and-dried,” Crosby said. “You work with them, you test them, you get them right. The biggest job here is cultural integration."
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Frontier also will be focusing on retaining and expanding a much larger work force than it has had. Plans for broadband expansion, a company goal backed up in many of its prospective new territories by orders from state regulators, mean that the company will be hiring, not only to replace Verizon hands departing through ordinary turnover but also for new jobs.
"We have to get the bodies lined up,” Crosby said. “We have our broadband plans in place, but we need to get people into the field to assess systems and infrastructure. We need to deploy bodies.” The company doesn’t know how many it will hire, but one state where Frontier expects to post want ads is West Virginia, Crosby said. “It sounds as if there’s a lot of work to be done there,” he said. “There are going to be jobs with benefits being filled in a place where unemployment is high."
West Virginia also is a state where the networks being acquired “need a lot of care and feeding,” Crosby said, citing a recent utility commission order that Verizon put $72.4 million in escrow to pay for improving the quality of service (CD May 18 p8). “We want some early wins to prove our detractors wrong,” he said. “And there will be those wins, even if they're as local as replacing a pole. We want to impress and delight our customers and surprise them in a positive way, so they know that we do what we say and that we follow through."
If the FCC goes along, the transaction will bring Frontier’s work force of 5,400, together with about 10,000 employees under Spinco, a company the Verizon formed to sell its landline networks and long-distance business in 14 states. “There are folks on both sides of the deal who have been with Verizon for years and with Frontier for years,” Crosby said. “The key challenge to [CEO] Maggie Wilderotter and the rest of Frontier’s upper management will be to integrate those two cultures as best we can in the right way. We cannot force our culture onto those 10,000 people working under Spinco."
Frontier’s growth by acquisition has accustomed the carrier to absorbing other corporate cultures, Crosby said. Regulatory constraints on interaction have kept Frontier and Verizon management largely at arms length from each another except for systems engineers working toward cutover, Crosby said. Frontier managers have been doing homework, he added. “We've been diving into Verizon’s origins and Frontier’s origins to get ready for the combination,” he said. “Of course, Verizon is a company that resulted from the combination of other companies,” as is Frontier, he said. “We need to see how we will come together and understand our mission."
That mission boils down to putting the customer first, Crosby said. “If you satisfy the customer you have a job,” he said. “That customer stays with the company, and word of mouth brings more customers, and you beat your competitors. We need to get that message and that philosophy across to 90 percent of the folks involved in the integration. We're literally calling ourselves `the new Frontier.'"
During the first month or two after the closing, Wilderotter and other Frontier executives will meet in person with all the employees, in groups of 20 to 500, Crosby said. “Maggie and the other company officers will present the company goals and get people moving forward,” he said. “The message is going to be, `customer retention, customer retention and customer growth.'”