Case studies
Performance reviews: HBJ Gateley Wareing
HBJ Gateley Wareing currently has approximately 140 partners, 750 staff and offices in Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leicester, London, Manchester, Nottingham and Dubai. We are now ranked in the top 40 law firms by size.
The firm introduced a broad range of flexible working support roles in our reception, security, administration and reprographics areas with varied start times and hours of work that appeal to a broader set of people. This has resulted in achievements in helping retired people back into work, attracting and retaining mothers with young children and attracting disabled colleagues as well as retaining some of the key talent we already had. The easy business benefit was the efficiency of service this offers to fee earning teams and to clients.
We introduced and encouraged part time and flexible working at partner/senior fee earner level which has been particularly successful at attracting and retaining mothers returning from maternity leave and those nearing retirement age with valuable contributions still to make but who didn't want the traditional hours of a busy commercial lawyer. Making promotions, including promotions to partner immediately before during and after maternity leave has been a particularly successful way of demonstrating openly to the entire workforce that our views on maternity leave are progressive and supportive.
We introduced 360 degree performance reviews into partner and management appraisals to that staff could tell us openly which partners/managers were supporting a positive culture and so that staff could recognise the value placed on people skills and promoting flexibility and life work balance. We utilise an appraisal form with E&D woven into many areas of performance. This involves individual and team responses. The data is handled anonymously by our HR team and granulated by diversity strand to identify both positive and negative trends.
We have introduced a formal CSR Group which is partner-led but includes members from across the business at all levels and from all offices. The CSR Group is responsible for defining our philosophy, setting out our strategy and capturing our activity. CSR is divided into 3 core strands of "people", "community" and "environment". Although the CSR Group is still in its relative infancy having only been around for a little over a year or so the fact that "people" is a key area they are working on continues to demonstrate the importance of our people within the business.
The CSR Group led the first staff survey a year ago which tackled many taboos by seeking information about sexual orientation, ethnicity, disability and religion and then reporting that to the business in a positive way. The CSR Group are being supported in conducting a wide ranging gap analysis, including Equality Impact Assessments with specific focus on challenging the firm to increase its performance around Equality and Diversity. By taking this approach staff can see we are proactively building on the feedback provided within the report.
The next step after completing the gap analysis stage is to set ourselves an aggressive strategy for closing those gaps and to achieve this we will engage with every area of the business both internally and with external stakeholders including clients and suppliers.