Art of retention

By Rona Cargill, HR Director, Harper Macleod

While the chips are down in the marketplace, it is as important as ever to treat your employees well – or face a mass exodus when the going gets good again.

Most law firms recognise that retaining employees is a fundamental objective. However, in this unstable economic climate, it is important that law firms continue to commit to meeting the needs and aspirations of employees and partners, to ensure their people remain engaged and loyal in the long term.

Staff and partners may look to move on if they are not fully aware of the full experience they have and their potential within the firm. All law firms are careful with costs at the moment, but simple low-cost initiatives can make a difference if you are marketing and promoting them in the right way. Often, employees do not realise the value of what they are actually getting already, such as internal training initiatives or the fact that your firm is an investor in people, for instance. This is one of the many ways HR and marketing can work together to improve retention.

Commitment to the health and wellbeing of staff cannot be underestimated. Health initiatives which go well beyond health & safety and employment law obligation can improve the quality of life of staff and make staff and partners feel that you really care about their wellbeing. Providing fresh fruit each day and ample drinking water can go a long way to improving employees’ health and making them feel valued.

Due to the current economic climate, it is common to assume that our people will feel lucky to have a job and therefore have lower expectations. However, productivity is highest when your people are motivated and feel valued, and as soon as the economic climate improves, employees with low morale will be the most likely to leave at the first opportunity.

Engagement and development

Previously, a key issue we have experienced within our firm is high levels of engagement in our people in the first two years of service, with a significant drop in those with three to five years’ service.

Feedback from staff showed us that many felt they had reached one step in their career but were not yet ready for the next, and were therefore not receiving the level of engagement and development opportunities that they previously had. This led us to develop a programme of excellence, highlighting what is required at each stage of employees’ careers, with a training programme tailored to each stage.

It is as important as ever to invest in training and development, with carefully targeted and tailored training programmes for your people if you want to retain them. Unfortunately, this can often be one of the first items on the chopping block during cost cutting exercises.

Line managers need to be accountable for staff retention and they need to understand this responsibility. They are dealing with your people on a day-to-day basis and are responsible for their development and performance, as well as putting out the firm’s message.

Our focus now is on the relationships our people have with their line managers, as this can often be the push factor behind a decision to leave, regardless of how the individual feels about the firm. It is important to remember that managers require the skills to enable them to people-manage effectively – in law firms, many good lawyers progress in the firm to a certain level and find themselves managing others without necessarily having the skills to do so.

Shifting priorities

Additionally, while it is important to engage employees in roles where they can develop and flourish, it is equally important, in tough times, to deploy staff where market needs dictate – or risk the future stability of the firm. From an HR perspective, this requires good communication and tact, as employees may need to move to roles outside their comfort zones.

From our own experience, we re-allocated and re-trained staff from less busy areas of the business to areas demonstrating potential growth, which enabled us to avoid redundancy, short-term working restrictions and pay cuts. We were careful to clearly explain to employees the reasons why we were undertaking the changes, and found that employees willingly stepped up to the challenge as a result.

Understandably, in the current climate, many firms have had no alternative but to defer trainees and have been unable to offer positions to newly qualified solicitors. However, I firmly believe that it is essential to keep nurturing internal talent or this could lead to a catastrophic effect on future skills and leadership within the profession.