We live in a hyper-engaged world. Media platforms of all stripes, from Facebook to YouTube, are shifting the cultural paradigm from transactional to participatory. No longer do we merely consume information, we participate in its production and diffusion. Those plugged into this changing landscape—which, let’s be honest, is everyone—carry its effects away from the screen and into all aspects of life, including the workplace. Should you aspire to retain top employees and remain competitive, your firm needs to catch this wave.
The Leeman Index calls this shift the “workplace experience revolution” and they’ve got studies demonstrating that companies who report the highest levels of productivity and pride are those who also deliver immersive, pleasurable, and supportive spaces. Gone are the days when employees merely sought a fat paycheck. Competitive wages continue to be an important driver, but of tantamount importance is a stimulating experiential environment. Put otherwise, today’s workers want meaningful connections with their colleagues and an active hand in personal and professional growth.
Below are five strategies for pivoting your firm’s culture from transactional to experiential:
1. Show, don’t tell. This principle is critical to building an inspiring working environment. Talk is cheap; your offices also need to look the part. Think ecosystem. Consider aestheticizing your different branches in similar ways and ensuring that your firm, as a whole, employs a recognizable visual brand. Just as it is the little things that turn a house into a home, it is the details that shape the environmental experience of a workspace.
2. Retool your employee onboarding program. You know that first impressions are crucial and your new employee orientation program should reflect this. Define your firm’s tone and purposefully communicate this from day one. Operative word: purposefully. Take such details as desk set-up and personal meet-and-greets into consideration. And have a strategy to extend this orientation experience through the first week, month, and year. Doubts on how to do this? Hiring and Empowering’s Smart Hire Solution™ for recruiting law firm staff includes a 90-day onboarding manual that ensures your new hire has no uncertainties as they take on their role at your firm.
3. Oil any “sticking” points. Take a moment to think about what may frustrate employee productivity and attend to this. Is the microwave broken? Does A/V equipment consistently fail? Though apparently benign, small annoyances add up to drive discontent. However tedious, fixing these issues goes a long way in transforming the ambience of your office.
4. Create opportunities for professional development. In offering employees access to mentoring or skill training, you signal your investment in their professional growth. By providing a range of such opportunities, you further encourage autonomy and flexibility—attributes which contribute not only to a more dynamic workforce, but to employee satisfaction, as well. Hiring and Empowering provides an effective tool in the form of our Team Empowerment Academy, should you be at a loss for how to implement such practices.
5. Draw a comprehensive geography. Each employee will have their strengths and weaknesses. If you notice an individual struggling with a certain task, ensure they understand the broader landscape to which their labor contributes. Feeling connected to a greater purpose increases tolerance for minor frustrations. By ensuring that all team members understand the larger company geography, you foster a sense of unity that nurtures the basic human need for a raison d’être.
While implementing such a sweeping cultural overhaul at your firm may seem daunting, addressing the above elements step by step will quickly elicit observable improvement in employee satisfaction and productivity, which will, itself, drive the changes you need to be making to improve employee loyalty, satisfaction and retention.
Ready to Make Some Experiential Changes at Your Firm?
Hiring & Empowering Solutions is happy to offer a FREE 30-minute discovery session with our founder Molly McGrath. Schedule yourself into her calendar now by clicking the button below. You can tell her your pain points, and begin brainstorming ways to smooth them over and get your law firm running like a well-oiled—and highly profitable—machine.
The unemployment rate is about as low as it’s ever been, holding steady at 3.8% throughout February and March. For employees, this is great news! For the U.S. economy, even better! But for your boutique law firm? Scary.
You’ve been at this for a while. You know that happy, engaged employees are essential to the growth of your firm. And you know this is cyclical: driven team members drive growth, growth drives motivation, motivation feeds happiness. Keeping this wheel turning is harder than it sounds, though. After all, your team members are not cogs but human beings—and human beings have complex needs.
Trust us…we get it. It’s easy to pull the trigger and make decisions from the comfort of your own leadership vacuum. After all, you know your firm better than anyone, which means you know better than anyone what your firm needs to grow progressively and sustainably…right?
It sounds like a no-brainer: pay your employees based on their performance. Provide merit-based pay raises, or incentivize your team with a bonus system for reaching short-term performance goals. Makes sense, right? Employees will go the extra mile for your firm, aiming for that raise or bonus. And those who don’t perform, well, they don’t see a bigger paycheck. The money your firm saves by not doling out raises to underperforming team members will fund the merit-based pay raise or bonus system for your rockstar employees.
