Don’t leave your people hanging
Understanding and respect is the key to staff retention, Darise Ogden discovers

Did you look after your employees in 2009? That’s a fairly loaded question, I admit, but it has to be asked. As does this one: If you were looking for staff right now, would your current staff be advocates or detractors? Would they encourage their friends to join your firm or would they warn them to stay away?

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that some firms may have taken their staff for granted last year. In previous years, when the UK market was so hot few lawyers stayed in New Zealand longer than two years, firms around New Zealand were concerned with retention. “How can we guard against our talented lawyers, who we have invested money in training and developing, from leaving us?” Others were concerned about attracting staff to areas outside the big cities. When market conditions changed last year, these concerns all but disappeared for some firms. The problem is so did the perception that certain partners actually valued their staff.

Many of the staff lawyers I spoke with in 2009 seemed truly disillusioned with the firms they were working for. One legal professional when asked whether she would be nominating her firm for the Employer of Choice Award in the 2009 New Zealand Law Awards™ scoffed loudly, and said, “They don’t deserve it!”

As work levels dropped off, young lawyers became concerned about their future – were they not getting the work because there was no work or because the partners did not believe they were capable? As team members’ billable hours went down, some partners concerned with their own survival (understandably) were notable failures when it came to looking after the interests of individual team members. In some firms, redundancies and natural attrition meant staff worked harder than ever before for little or no extra remuneration (or even, dare I say it, thanks). Some firms took cost-cutting so seriously that things such as the office fruit basket and weekly subsidised massages simply disappeared. Still other firms made training a luxury. Sure, their staff had more time on their hands, and yes, they should be developing new areas of legal business to attract different clients to their doors, but no, the firms were not prepared to pay for the training necessary to assist in that client development.

Many firms chose to adopt pay freezes last year; staff understood this – it was a tough year, and most were just thankful that they still had jobs. But when some firms announced that the pay freezes would continue into 2010, except for those individuals who “truly deserved” a pay rise, tensions began to rise. If you got the letter saying no pay rise, what did that mean? Was it the firm’s way of telling you that you did not make the grade? Should you be looking for a new job? Did they not value the work you did for them last year?

So what, as a partner, should you do if you think you may have let things lapse a little last year when it came to looking after your staff? Iniate It’s Eleni Balmer says treating your staff with honour and respect is the key, as well as understanding that what drives them may not necessarily be the same thing that drives the partnership.

A meeting of the goals
Balmer says that one of the mistakes firms make in respect of their employment relationships is that they fail to understand that the partnership’s goals may not always equate with those of their employees. “The profit dollar might be the goal for the partners, but it might not necessarily be the goal for the individuals within the team,” she says.

To be effective people managers, partners need to take the time out to understand what motivates their individual team members. There needs to be recognition of what their goals are, says Balmer. It could be that they are wishing to advance in the partnership, or practice a particular area of law, or perhaps they could benefit from mentoring and do, in fact, want to be mentored. If the partners recognise and understand the goals of their individual team members, then they will have a better chance of leveraging those goals in order to meet the partnership’s goals. “It’s actually about understanding the individuals, how they fit into that team, what kind of team you want to create, and what the team needs to achieve,” says Balmer.

Taking the time to stop and “honour” your employees by rewarding them with feedback on work well done (especially where financial constraints do not enable you to increase salaries or pay bonuses) may also assist employees to feel that the firm does, in fact, value them.

Where partners have patience for the fact that some team members will not have the same goals as the partnership, and where they understand and respect employees enough, then Balmer says employees will buy into what the partners want to achieve because they know that the partners have recognised them as much as the job.

Employees are people
Everything, says Balmer, comes down to relationships. If you want really good work from your employees, you must build on your relationships. Employees are more than just “human resources”; they are people working with you in a business with the ultimate goal – let’s be frank – to make money. But Balmer says this can be done in a cohesive and respectful and fun way. It can also be done in a manic, stressful, and negative way. “It actually boils down to choice,” she says. Partners as the business leaders are the ones who will make that choice, and it is they who will create the culture within which the individual members of the firm will have to function.

Balmer recommends firms engage a person in the business who actually cares about people to be a mouthpiece for the employees; someone who is prepared to take the partners to task where decisions made are not in the best interest of the employees, or where perhaps individuals have not been shown the level of respect or honour the partnership has agreed it wants as its culture. The best person for this role, she says, is someone who has shown that they treat everyone equally, that they have just as much respect for a partner as they do for the office junior, and that what is said to them remains confidential (unless there is permission for them to share it with the partnership).

At the end of the day, says Balmer, employees also need to recognise that law firms are in the business of creating money. For employees not driven by this goal, there is always going to be tension. “You’re going to have to always ride that tension as an employee,” she says, “but that can be a smoother path than not, if the management team recognise that and find ways to accommodate a different perspective."