Are the members of your staff working up to their potential? Are they working together to the greatest effect? Do you have effective recruiting, training, evaluation, and retention programs? Your firm's success — its profitability and quality of life — depend, in large measure, on your people. While this appears obvious at face value, far too many firms tolerate a drag on results because they either don't have the right people on board, or they're not helping them perform up to their potential. Others struggle with frequent turnover and the significant financial impact it causes.
By implementing a handful of key personnel systems, your firm won't suffer either fate. Rather, it will become an organization for which your staff and associates love to work, one that provides the kind of client service experience that builds reputation and establishes yours as the go-to firm for your market.
AREAS OF FOCUS
- Hire and Keep Top Performers
- Configure Your Staff Correctly
- Promote Teamwork
- Provide Ongoing Training
- Motivate For Improved Performance
Hire and Keep Top Performers
Given that every firm wants to hire the best available lawyers and staff, you must approach this critical business function with a "best practices" model. Why? Because when you fail to attract and keep top performers, the effect on your law firm is significant. You find yourself hiring, supervising, training, and eventually firing people who just aren't the right fit. Additional costs include low quality work, deterioration of client relationships, low staff morale, and increased risk of malpractice.
Conversely, when you hire and keep great people, you can build a team of professional and support staff with long-term commitments to the health and success of the firm.
We'll help you put into place the mechanisms of a great HR approach − from nuts-and-bolts recruiting and pre-hire screening, to training, to conducting performance reviews that promote professional growth and loyalty. The HR piece is often the area about which law firm owners feel least confident. It doesn't have to be that way for you.
Configure Your Staff Correctly
It's all too common to find a mismatch between the work that needs to get done and the people tasked with doing that work. Too many or too few staff, under- or over-qualified individuals in a given position, and overlapping job descriptions are a few of the contributors to inefficiency, overwhelm, lowered productivity, and squandered human resources — even though people are working hard.
By conducting a workflow needs assessment, you'll be able to determine if the right people are in the right roles, given the nature and volume of work to be done.
Configuring your staffing to maximize productivity and profits is a key to effective law firm management. Needs assessments and accurate job descriptions begin to tell the story of how well you're hitting this mark and where staff reconfiguration is in order.
Promote Teamwork
If teamwork isn’t at the heart of your firm culture, you're losing opportunities and leaking momentum. You’ve probably seen it in action in sports; it’s that moment, for example, on the basketball court when a strong player is wide open to shoot but no one’s passing her the ball. In that moment, the team suffers − and the same applies to your firm. Turf holding and the lone-ranger mentality, combined with the stress of a demanding environment tend to lead to an individualist mentality. When your firm’s team skills are lagging, you’re never as effective, impressive or profitable as you could be.
Good teams, on the other hand, communicate clearly, hold one another accountable, have a high level of mutual trust and confidence, inspire each other, and appreciate everyone’s contributions (not just that of the stars or the attorneys, but everyone's). Team members experience pride when they generate good results and support one another under pressure. But this doesn't happen by itself. You need to foster it consciously.
Provide Ongoing Training
It's easy to forget that getting the new hire through the door and settled at a desk is only the beginning of integrating, developing, and retaining great staff. By de-emphasizing training, you’re failing to develop your most important resource: your people. When your people don’t advance their skills and contributions — whether in administrative work, marketing, client service, legal representation, or any other aspect of your operation — your business suffers.
In addition to training in hard skills, law practices must provide training on the interpersonal front, too. Firms where people learn to handle difficult clients, and where they work together effectively and develop good communications skills have a big leg up on their competitors.
Substantive training opportunities also provide a powerful incentive for people to stay with the firm. In fact, research unequivocally shows that the opportunity for professional growth is significantly more important to most employees than salary! The skill set and experience level with which new hires arrive should represent the starting benchmark for growth, not the end game. As you train and develop your staff to take on more and higher level duties, the results will redound to your firm’s benefit.
Motivate For Improved Performance
Regular performance evaluations let you spot issues early on, identify training needs, and track progress, and thereby, avoid problems before they become serious. Where there are weaknesses, reviews provide a systematic opportunity for learning, growth, and improvement. In the absence of regular reviews, your employees' contributions often go unacknowledged, and their motivation and buy-in wanes. There are several compelling reasons in addition to overall performance improvement to conduct regular evaluations. For example, if you need to terminate staff, you’ll have documentation upon which to base your action.
Believe it or not, your staff and associates want your specific and honest evaluation of how they're doing. In fact, they need it to be their best. The research is clear here too: performance improvement is best reinforced by a combination of developmental/corrective feedback and positive recognition tied to specific actions.
With a solid system of performance evaluations, you’ll end up retaining more good staff, lowering your turnover, and developing more star players. SuccessTrack ESQ provides you the forms and the process you'll need to implement this important function and transform it from an onerous task you'd rather avoid to a professional competency about which you feel proud.
