To the core

Many law firms have signed themselves up to a set of firm-wide ‘values’ in recent years – a clear articulation of what they hope will differentiate them from the considerable competition in the market. But values could be more than a mere marketing exercise – driving tangible internal change and ultimately boosting productivity.

By Richard Brent

It has long been recognised that employee morale can be a very significant factor in overall business productivity. The equation is hardly complicated. Workers who feel engaged with their employer are more likely to work harder, putting in discretionary effort and initiative, sharing knowledge that will benefit their co-workers as well as themselves, and will generally operate with the organisation’s overall goals in mind. The most successful workplaces, therefore, regularly assess the state of that morale, communicating effectively and taking steps to correct cases where it is looking less than healthy.

That effort has clearly been put under additional pressure in recent months. The rapidly-deepening recession, and its dramatic impact on unemployment figures, has not been kind to employers, who face difficult decisions in light of current economic conditions. Each day seems to bring another high-profile redundancy announcement, while pay freezes, and even cuts, are being seen as another possible solution in some quarters. Add emotive factors such as fear and the resulting stress, and you may find a firm’s overall morale level is lower than it has been for a long time. And while one argument is likely to be that people in work should be grateful for that fact alone, the reality of individual psychology means working life is unlikely to be that simple. More so than in better days, it is now imperative for businesses to show they are attuned to employee concerns and that individual effort is appreciated.

Being responsible

Ironically, however, businesses could actually be in a better position to deal with such difficulties and limit the damage now, in 2009, than in previous downturns. As many surveys have concluded, the so-called ‘Generation Y’ comprised of today’s 20 and 30-somethings is often a rather different breed from a law firm’s typical senior management. The job for life, the professional status and accelerating accumulation of wealth, aren’t necessarily the all-consuming drivers and clear-cut measures of success they once were. The 21st Century lawyer may well be looking for something slightly different – a better work/life balance, more options for personal development, perhaps even a second career in another area.

At the same time, it is unlikely to be entirely coincidental that corporate social responsibility (CSR) seems to have grown in importance for businesses at the same time that Generation Y has grown more vocally powerful. These are individuals who often want to feel they are doing more than making money. Indeed, CSR can really be seen as the embodiment of one of the most notable trends among Generation Y employees – a demand that their chosen employer has certain ‘values’, clearly demonstrated, beyond the pursuit of pure profit.

Words, words, words

Whether they concern wider social responsibility or the employee’s everyday experience, moreover, many law firms are now extremely keen to demonstrate that some sort of values framework forms an important part of their operations. It has become apparent that these can have multiple benefits, winning extra points in client pitches as well as being a weapon in the ongoing ‘war for talent’. Websites and brochures proudly parade a string of adjectives they claim their organisation ‘stands for’. Client-focused, teamwork, respect, excellence and innovation are all understandable favourites, with many variations on the themes and no shortage of minor manifestos going into different degrees of detail as to what these promising words mean in practice.

For law firm Nabarro, the process of choosing values was about more than marketing, however – actually helping to crystallise that most nebulous of concepts, a workplace ‘culture’. Senior partner Simon Johnston explains: “In the late 1990s we began to talk about values as important aspects of our culture. We started trying to put some labels on these things. Then in 2004 we launched an internal strategy paper, and culture was one of the key issues that came out of it. That’s when we started to push it hard.”

Nabarro arrived at six key concepts: Quality, Respect, Team Work, Commitment, New Ideas and Community Responsibility. ‘teamwork’ was a particularly resonant one, Johnston says, as the firm was actively “pushing a one-firm philosophy” at the time. Other of the values speak for themselves, including ‘Community Responsibility’, already identified as a key employee concern, and ‘New Ideas’, clearly linked to a spirit of innovation. “We were standing up and saying that we’d talked about these things for a long time, but a large element was annunciating what we already thought were some of the good things about the culture,” Johnston continues.

“If interviewing laterals, one of the first things we talk about is the culture of the firm. Team working is an important part of that, for example. We don’t tolerate prima donna egos and we make that clear to people.”

At international law firm Lovells, values are also considered to embody the firm’s culture – “a combination of elements that were already part of the culture of the firm, together with things we felt we could do better,” according to Asia regional managing partner Crispin Rapinet, the project’s principal sponsor.

As with Nabarro, Lovells’s project was closely linked to a strategic review of the firm’s direction, but for Rapinet this was a relatively new process. In 2006 the firm’s international executive developed a ‘vision’ and strategy, which was formally presented to the partnership conference for discussion in November of that year, he explains. “We identified a number of key strategic components that would enable us to achieve our vision, and said that the values were the foundation on which those elements would be based.” For Lovells the ‘one-firm’ message is similarly important. Indeed, the motto ‘one firmwide team’ is itself one of the values. Otherwise however, although a “healthy debate” ensued at the international level, Rapinet admits the results were consensual and “not controversial”. “Lovells manages to operate in a fairly homogenous way around the world,” he says. International offices were not at odds over what they stood for.

Valuable tools

Rather than being groundbreaking, for Lovells the most notable outcome of the values has instead been their practical application to enhance performance. They might be convenient shorthand for a culture as well, but Rapinet says one of his key tasks has been effectively integrating the values into the firm’s day-to-day functioning.

“Since the initial rollout in March 2007, a big challenge has been to keep them fresh and at the front of people’s minds. One aspect has been measuring behaviours by reference to values.” Partner review and appraisal forms have been rewritten, he explains, and a presentation brochure is now given to every new joiner. “We’ve also held workshops in every office and each working team. People have discussed them, asked what they mean in practice and identified how you can implement them in daily life,” he says. The firm also ran a feedback survey to gain some further insight into more practical points. For instance, one question posed was how often, if ever, people had read a client’s annual accounts or viewed its website? For a firm whose first of four values is “Clients come first”, the implication is that this is an activity that could easily assist that value’s application.

Jonhston agrees that values have a practical use, and adds that this can be in the context of both positive and negative behaviours. As he says, management can conveniently talk about the values and ‘culture’ early in the recruitment process, but these things can also be referred to on an ongoing basis. “If there are issues in terms of behaviour, we can point to the core values and tell people they are very, very important to us. We can then set objectives or just give reminders. We really try to ‘live’ these things, and reinforce them when there are opportunities.”

At Reed Smith, another law firm to have developed values fairly recently, London managing partner Richard Swinburn describes them as “a useful hook” for his oversight of the London office. “When asked to comment on people for evaluation purposes, I’m asked with reference to these core values. There’s a huge amount of data and material you can garner from managers about performance, such as financial data, but then there are also citizenship issues. Senior management is fed with a lot of other data through our practice group business lines, but values provide quite a good framework for more holistic comment.”

They can also be used to “ask rhetorical questions” of people in a less structured way, such as how they are contributing to the firm’s stated vision of legal service, particularly in the case of ideas with “a degree of momentum”, Swinburn adds. The firm values ‘performance’ and ‘innovation and improvement’ would fall into this category. “This could centre on using the space we occupy in such a way as to promote quality of service to one another, in order that we can then deliver the best possible service to our clients. You can do this on a collective basis, but it’s also useful on an individual basis,” he explains.

A delicate balance

I have little doubt that any discussion of corporate values will raise at least a few eyebrows among lawyers. Cynics will most probably fall into one of two camps: those who see such projects as inherently ‘soft’ initiatives, unrelated to fundamental business objectives, and on the other side those who find the idea of imposing organisational values on individuals a somewhat oppressive enterprise at the best of times. Given the backdrop of the current economic woes, it may seem like a straightforward case of time-wasting.

For Manchester-based law firm Pannone, this is all a question of striking the right balance though. Operations partner Rachel Dobson says the firm doesn’t have “a formal values statement” at present, and would be wary of “introducing a lot of HR speak”, “Lawyers hate that,” she explains, adding that the firm specifically pursues a “sensible, down-to-earth” feel. Dobson, a lawyer herself, is also responsible for HR processes and staff welfare at the firm. “Everybody hates those training programmes that are just interminable and involve lots of box-ticking,” she explains.

When people come to Pannone, moreover, they will usually have a pretty good idea of what the firm ‘stands for’ already. The most basic background research will reveal that the firm has been the highest-placed law firm in the annual Sunday Times ‘Best Companies’ competition for a number of years, and it has repeated this success once again in 2009. Some 90 per cent of the marks for the ranking are based on confidential staff feedback, but ten per cent look at a submission from the firm. Here there is an opportunity to give the firm’s ‘values statement’ and explain how it is communicated, but Pannone leaves this section blank. “It doesn’t seem to have done us any harm,” Dobson says. “In common with quite a lot of organisations I’ve spoken to through that competition we’ve got a clear culture, but it isn’t one that has been written down in great detail.”

You wouldn’t describe Dobson as a cynic for this though, and she recognises the firm can’t be complacent in always relying on “word of mouth” to keep its culture in tact, as it has largely done to date. “What we’ve managed to get away with informally, we now feel we have to change, and articulating values is a part of that.”

“I think it’s part of an evolutionary process, moving from being a medium-sized firm to being a large firm. Until now we’ve always been able to rely on culture and size to keep things going. We haven’t felt the need to have something formal, but we have now reached a size where we recognise we can’t just rely on that. We need to make sure we’re being clear with everyone.”

The ‘clarity’ issue is an interesting one, and again ties back to the issue of morale. By using a values framework and going into detail about what it means, a business can clearly demonstrate to all its people that is has their interests in mind. It is not surprising that ‘respect’ is a very common value, for instance, but of course this means a firm’s respect for its own people, as well as a sense of being ‘strict’ that people respect one another in an office environment. As a business gets larger, communicating this ‘care’ clearly, continually and consistently obviously becomes a harder task.

Dobson also points to a perhaps more practical example of this in action. In 2009 Pannone will introduce a new career structure and training and development package, including associate and senior associate positions for the first time. She explains: “We’ve always done very well on training and development when measured externally, but people have learnt by working very closely with partners. We have a lot of good partners, but we now see this can’t just be dependent on who the partner happens to be. We’ve got a lot of very good people, and we want to make sure we are clear with them about what they need to do to progress.”

Individual choice

As mentioned above, however, one obvious complaint about the very concept of any firm-wide values is that they are imposed on those below from those above to encourage a certain type of behaviour that corresponds to the firm’s ‘brand’. Firms will vary in terms of how far they pursue this path of course, but coach Rachel Brushfield of Energise Brand Communications makes the point that it is an element of this mindset that is in fact one of the most common problems.

“One of the key issues for law firms to crack is an appreciation of different levels of brands. The firm has values, but so do individual practice groups and individual partners. If this isn’t recognised you can get dissonance – an inner tug of war,” Brushfield says. It is the same with individuals as with organisations, she explains. If a person has conflicting values that are unrecognised, this can cause unhappiness and stress, which isn’t good for productivity. “When people honour their values, they are more productive. They are more engaged. They light up.”

Brushfield, who has coached former Clifford Chance managing partner Peter Cornell among other lawyers, also believes that the current legal landscape makes a true appreciation of values even more timely. “With the Legal Services Act firms are going to grow more specialist and need to get better at marketing. Partners will have different interpretations of what values mean, so they need to be less generic and more specific. Otherwise it can all be in their heads.” Finally, she too highlights that values are even more of a driver for the Generation Y lawyers that will be the future of all law firms.

Reed Smith’s Swinburn agrees that values can’t be imposed. “It’s axiomatic really that you’re not trying to impose values on an organisation, but that an organisation already has values and what you’re trying to do is define those values and think of examples in which they can be usefully applied, both externally and internally.” Indeed, in the initial stages of arriving at its own five pillars, Reed Smith brought in a team of consultants and ran workshops with staff at all levels, partners and more junior employees, and across all international offices. Thus, while descriptors may or may not strike a personal chord, at the very least all parts of the firm were represented in discussions.

Finally of course, an individual’s personal values will fall outside the remit of any firm, but the firm can at least do some work to understand the most prevalent motivations of its people.

At global intellectual property firm Rouse, however, the firm does attempt to identify and work with values on a more personal basis. “An important part of the face-to face part of the appraisal process is looking at our people’s longer-term aspirations,” says chief executive Rupert Ross-Macdonald. Rouse has also recently begun drawing up what it terms “role profiles”, ensuring its stated values are also enshrined there. In the Indonesian office, moreover, management has actually asked employees to draft their own aspiration profiles, outlining “who they want to be and what they would like to achieve”. More ad-hoc open communication is also actively encouraged, with a ‘hopes wall’ set up in the canteen for anonymous feedback on any issues, positive or negative views. The firm has found that “a lack of transparency is the single biggest cause of dissatisfaction with employees”.

Brand recognition

Of course, while values might be hard to impose, they do need to be communicated and marketed in some way – or, arguably, what is the point? Rapinet says that Lovells saw a need for values definitions “internally, but also externally”. “Clients have shown a lot of interest, and we’ve been very keen to communicate them to clients”. In presentations and pitches the firm has adopted the visual imagery of a DNA strain to suggest the way the four values are intertwined, and this is used across the firm, including on screensavers and mouse mats. At Reed Smith, while the values are still really in their infancy following the landmark 2007 merger with Richards Butler, Swinburn says its global managing partner often frames his communications with reference to one or another of them. When Nabarro underwent a major rebrand in 2007 it clearly linked this effort to the values, in fact introducing two further descriptors after engaging branding specialist (and client) Identica. After discussions at all levels across the firm, the consultants found two ideas that should have been brought to the fore as key values were ‘clarity’ and ‘user-friendliness’. They were embedded values the firm hadn’t even appreciated; hence the new strap line ‘Clarity Matters’. Recruitment advertising, a new logo and the firm’s website also all took pains to reflect these additional values.

As Brushfield implicitly acknowledges, when all is said and done corporate values do boil down to branding – whether that is the firm’s brand as an ‘employer of choice’ or the impression of individuals taken away by clients. What is important, however, is that words are matched by deeds, and that symbols are also seen to have substance behind them. Certainly this becomes more difficult as law firms grow larger and time is of the essence. Now that many are unfortunately scaling back, perhaps a vigorous re-assessment of what Rapinet calls the “building blocks” of a strategy could be more of a priority than many may think.