Developing your Best Asset

Your staff are your best asset, and developing them is a bit like a conveyor belt: we start with the raw materials and add the skills, competencies and behaviours. What you get at the other end is a valuable, highly skilled and trained employee who has clearly defined goals and targets to achieve throughout their career with you.

Your employees can only achieve their true potential when they are supported and helped to develop. Giving them goals to achieve (defined competencies, a skills base and a re-defined job description) is half the battle. Publishing this information and reinforcing its message will empower staff to take responsibility for their own development and training, where necessary.

This in turn helps you meet your business objectives. Good for them, good for you, and good for the business.

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Skills audit

We are often told that while firms have many long-serving staff, some have reached the top of the salary scale not necessarily because they are the best at what they do, but because of who they work with. In other words, they have climbed to the top of their ladder because they have stayed with a fee-earner who has achieved partnership.

And while there are very many senior secretaries in firms across the country who are excellent at what they do, and have adapted and changed their working practices to accommodate those of the firm and partnership, there are many others who have not.

A skills audit can help you develop your junior and senior secretaries so that they acquire the best skills for today’s professional working environment.

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Task Analysis

Sometimes a firm will find that managers and professional staff are regularly performing tasks that could be done by someone else in the organisation more cost-efficiently. This may be because it has always been so. It may even be that they believe no one else is able to do it! However it is vital to know exactly which tasks staff members are carrying out, so that you can have the most cost efficient person do them.

This can lead to redeployment of staff which means you have people with knowledge of your culture, your people and your aims, who will do a new role, in a new way, and be the most cost effective person to do it.

This in turn makes teams, departments and ultimately the firm, more efficient and cost effective, since there will be no duplication of tasks, and the best person for each task actually does it. It will also mean that everyone is constantly being challenged. And this improves motivation, output and morale.

Please do contact us to discuss how to align tasks your employees perform with the roles they fulfil.

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Graded career ladder & job descriptions

A senior secretary or administrator usually has better skills and more experience in the role. Junior staff frequently want to take on more, and to develop themselves so they can achieve a different position, or a new job title.

Of course, there has to be a vacancy at the next step up, but in the meantime they can demonstrate their ability and candidacy by working towards the next rung on the ladder through gaining the skills and experience required.

Senior secretaries, too, often complain that “there is no-where for me to go”. We disagree! The problem is getting them to identify and work towards other responsibilities, for example as a co-ordinator, a team leader, an administrator, an IT trainer, etc.

We can help you to re-draft job descriptions for tasks, roles, responsibilities and authority levels at each stage. And of course, you will develop your senior secretaries by using them as mentors, trainers, and role models in the process. By doing this you gain at every stage.

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Stepped skills and competency matrices

Once you know what has to be done within each team or practice area we can help you decide the skills and competency levels required to perform each task. This then provides a stepped matrix for secretarial and support staff roles within the firm which can and should be linked to performance management and appraisal.

The skills matrix can even be personalised for each of your practice areas. For example a secretary in litigation will not have the same forms to fill in, software to use, or process to monitor as one in insolvency or property.

Naturally there will be some overlaps, such as putting together instructions to counsel. However, once these differences are mapped out, a secretary in personal injury could then start working on achieving the competencies for, say, company commercial, as a first step to transferring across to or becoming a departmental float.

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Appraisals and processes

Appraisals and performance management are linked, but they are not the same (see “Performance Management”). Appraisal is the end of the cycle. It is a formal opportunity to review an individual’s performance over the past six/twelve months.

More importantly an appraisal is quality time devoted to looking forward over the next six to twelve months so that targets and goals can be set, by way of objectives that meet the business needs.

Many managers and appraisees find the whole process either a waste of time and simply pay lip service to it, or they find it a nerve-wracking and daunting experience. Few devote the time and skills needed for the process to be truly effective and forward looking.

We can help you:

• Design the annual appraisal system and informal review process
• Design the forms and write the guidelines
• Introduce the new processes to your firm
• Train appraisors in the process and in conducting the reviews confidently
• Train appraisees to make the most of the process and take responsibility for their review and their development

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Performance Management

Appraisals are not possible without managing an individual’s performance throughout the year - and in many cases on a daily basis. And by managing performance throughout the year, the appraisal process and form filling is made easier.

To do this effectively, the individuals in your teams need guidelines (standards and competencies) against which they can be appraised.

Performance management is setting and maintaining standards of behaviour and performance. We can train your managers and supervisors to set and manage standards of performance and behaviour, and give them new and better communication and interpersonal skills. Through developing their confidence, these managers and supervisors will be able to carry forward and demonstrate the firm’s values.

All firms have to maintain profit to ensure survival. And the root of a successful and profitable business is its people. Those profits depend on how well people are managed. In other words: whether and how you manage their performance!

If you’d like help with any of your performance management issues, contact us.

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Stress Management

We spend up to 95% of our lives interacting with others. At work these relationships are thrust upon us and over 80% of job terminations are due to poor relationship skills rather than poor technical skills.

Many firms have teams which, by the nature of the work, are highly pressured and can be very stressed: volume conveyancing; call centres; personal injury litigation units; even marketing and events teams have to work under pressure to achieve targets, tight deadlines and high service levels. All organisations run the risk of costly public litigation and employment tribunals if the Health & Safety Executive Guidelines are ignored.

We work closely and confidentially with you to draft, write and publish Stress Management policies, and introduce the policies and coping strategies to staff through workshops.

We can also help you with a stress audit through one or a combination of the following:

• By each staff member completing a confidential questionnaire. The results would be re-submitted to you in the form of a highly detailed, confidential report.
• By setting up, appointing and facilitating focus groups across the firm. This will help you identify where, when and how pockets of stressed individuals exist.
• By carrying out one-to-one interviews with members of staff and assessing the needs and situations on a personal basis.

And of course we can address the preventative causes of pressure and stress by giving staff the skills to cope, when they attend our workshops and training courses.

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