The 3 proven principles that companies can lean on to overcome commercial & wellbeing issues in 2021

Establishing a workplace culture where all your people are functioning and performing well is, especially these days, very challenging.

But it's possible; and valuable. With an evidence-based approach your firm can overcome the common and stubborn commercial and HR issues that legal firms commonly experience.

By addressing thew common root-cause of all these issues, you can move toward being recognised as a stand-out & admired firm by clients, associates & peers.

You may feel you're running very fast but standing still. In fact 80%+ of firms have concerns around writing new business and retaining existing clients.(1)

Companies everywhere are seeing and feeling the rising revenue drain associated with a staff of professionals who are struggling to be proactive, creative, mentally agile and able to master the daily requirements that drive a sustainably successful company.

“We have the perfect storm of both personality traits and career circumstances which are generally known to cause depression. Most lawyers are type-A people who put way too much pressure on themselves, even when they are doing great financially and professionally. They always want to do better and rarely think that they have done enough to deserve a break......Also, in our profession, we are always being attacked, literally, from opposing counsel and other players in litigation. Other than professional boxing, I can’t think of any other profession where the job requires constant fighting!”

Tina Willis @ Tina Willis Law.

The net result is a fall in workplace performance that is costing firms substantial revenue & opportunity. And when people decide to escape to fresh pastures - to try a new firm where they hope things are better - your firm is looking at €20,000+ of associated expenses related to each move and recruiting a replacement. It's a perfect storm. (2)

It's evident that the tendency toward a tactical approach above a strategic one is rarely effective (3). Quite often ‘bolt-on' solutions have no little grounding in the principles that support sustainable positive outcomes. A strategic approach provides better short, medium and long term outcomes as well as positive return on investment.

Most of the prevalent commercial and human-resource issues within legal firms are rooted in people's ability to access their ability - or, as is the case, their inability to access their talent and ability.

Little point having a 400 horsepower engine if you can only get 100 horsepower out of it.

Your firm is simply a collection of people; so it stands to reason that if the people are able to do better, your firm will do better.

So what are the fundamentals that will help you improve how people feel & function, leading to better performance and, ultimately, a decline in commercial and HR concerns?

There are three proven performance principles that have a direct influence on your ability to function well,

Stress - we need to understand stress & stressors at an individual level; then how to balance and manage it to outweigh negative effects

Sleep - Quality rest, recovery and restoration are essential for good daily performance. It's long proven that challenges around sleep have a negative effect of ability to focus, think, interact and behave appropriately.

Staying active - physical activity is at the core of feeling well and ready to perform. Again, raising heartbeat and exciting your physiology has been show to have a myriad of benefits for workplace performance as well as health. Sadly, the opposite is also true and evident.

The 3S - Stress, Sleep and Staying active - are baseline principles of performance in all walks of life. Simple, obvious....yet largely overlooked. Optimise the 3S and you begin to embed a performance culture; get them wrong and it's like firing a cannon from a canoe.

Image: Sample individual daily summary from CONNECT Lifestyle Assessment

Empowering people to improve in the 3S principle performance factors is a proven approach to impacting positively on how people function; a healthier professional who is ready and able to perform is able to bring an 'A' game every day.

We can see clearly that a focus on these simple performance factors will have an impact not only on strategic HR issues but also on bottom line

The results are astonishing - Harvard researchers conclude that, on average, for every dollar spent on employee wellbeing & performance, medical costs fall $3.27 and absenteeism drops $2.73. This is a 6-to-1 return on investment (4)

Issues with stress balance\management, sleep quality and a more sedentary lifestyle have causal links with burnout. Burnout diminishes the ability to work to potential and has a profound impact on year-end results.

What won't change is the fact that the corporate & business world will continue to be a dynamic, demanding environment. Professionals have to be able top thrive within that.

The strategic solution to all this? An evidence-based strategic approach is far more likely to get the verdict.

Being proactive with the 3S, and the corresponding improvement in everyones performance, means you can be oversubscribed, have a thriving, high-performing staff with peers and talented graduates will be looking in from outside to see what's different.

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Paul Clarke operates CONNECT Performance.

CONNECT offer an individualised, science-backed and data-based solution to help small-medium companies overcome their persistent HR and commercial issues. Clients quickly understand that business performance is linked directly with people performance. Leveraging the 3S Performance Principles, CONNECT bring to life the Ready To Perform program - an individualised solution aimed at empowering people to move quickly along the learning curve and make the simple changes that will deliver huge return on how they feel and function every day. The CONNECT solution is optimised for professionals working remotely.

References:

1. https://www.lexisnexis.co.uk/bellwether/stress-in-the-legal-profession.html
2. https://www.hrreview.co.uk/hr-news/tthe-high-cost-of-legal-recruitment/113296
3. https://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/news/articles/wellbeing-programmes-have-no-short-term-impact-on-employee-health#gref
4. https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2009.0626
5. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleystahl/2020/07/08/3-career-paths-known-to-cause-burnout/