However, another possible scenario is that the candidate will have an offer from one firm, but is actually waiting on an offer from his or her first choice. Thus, the firm that has made the offer is the candidate’s backup.
There are a variety of ways to tell if this is the situation with a particular candidate. Members of the firm should be advised that by the third time you take the offered candidate out to lunch, his or her questions should already be answered. Either the candidate is having trouble making up his or her mind, in which situation no amount of cajoling is likely to do any good, or the firm is being played for a better offer from someone else. In either situation, it is critical that the firm handle the issue professionally. Once it is determined that sufficient resources have been expended on a candidate, the firm
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should make it clear that it will await the candidate’s decision within a reasonable time frame, but that the offer does have an expiration date.
The Phases of Retention
Postrecruiting, professional staff retention becomes important. This section covers the issues related to retention. Chapter 10 discusses compensation, career tracks, and professional development in more detail.
Periodic Individual Review and Feedback
(Individual Review)
Feedback, feedback, feedback. Regardless of a professional’s view of retention in general, it is axiomatic that individual reviews are a staple of firm life.
Questions remain, however, around how formal the review process is (or should be), the extent to which reviews affect compensation through bonuses and merit salary increases, and the time periods appropriate for review.
Above all, the review process should be honest—do not allow the professional to hold views of his or her abilities or opportunities for advancement that the firm does not hold.
Formal reviews are the most widely accepted manner of providing feedback within the firm. The formal reviews should take place on a periodic basis, but no less than annually, and should take place at the same time of year for all professional employees. Six-month reviews can be beneficial, but this will depend entirely on the business of the firm. If the employee has been working on only one project, for one supervisor, for six months, it is likely that the employee and the supervisor both know exactly where the employee stands with regard to his or her work, and a formal review would be nothing more than window-dressing and a waste of everyone’s time.
The reviews should have both a scoring system under certain categories and a section for the evaluating professional to add personal comments or expand on answers in the numerical section.
The written evaluation allows for the supervisors or evaluators to clearly document the professional’s progress, strengths, and weaknesses. Farther down the road, when the professional is being considered for promotion or partnership, these evaluations can present a strong road map and argument either for or against the promotion. For this reason, firms should be encouraged to be honest on the evaluations. Nothing engenders bad will and inter-firm gossip more quickly than a firm that “strings along” its associates, only to tell them after seven years that they are not partner material. It is far better to keep professionals apprised on a yearly basis of their prospects for advancement and how such prospects, if bleak, can be improved. Also, once it
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becomes obvious that a person (such as a misfit, as described earlier) needs to find another home, that should be dealt with at the next yearly evaluation at least, and it can be done by a trusted advisor informally prior to that. Both the employee and the firm will be much better off if everyone is honest about the future direction of each party. Chapter 10 outlines the process of appraising employee performance in detail.
Employee Satisfaction Programs on a
Class-Wide or Level-Wide Basis (Group
Review and Feedback)
The concept of group feedback in a professional services firm can take many forms: associate committee, non-equity steering committee, associate compensation review, and so on. The basic premise behind each is the same: to serve as a conduit through which nonequity professionals provide input to the firm. The meetings are usually held at least yearly and in some firms, as often as quarterly. There is normally no voting power, and equity holders have no obligation to heed the committee’s advice. However, it allows the associates to feel as if their concerns are being heard, and it provides for a source of information that many partners would never know.
For example, many partners speak only of “office matters” and would
rather leave all other matters (including quality of life) to the hours when employees are “off the clock.” However, if there is a competing firm that continually addresses quality of life matters, the associate committee at Firm 1 is likely to bring that to the attention of the equity partners. If the matter is a continual refrain, perhaps some partners will engage before their own associates decide to test the waters at Firm 2.
Mentorship Programs
The concept of a formal mentoring program in a professional services firm has gained far more credence in the past 10 years than at any time prior.
However, it is a mistake to believe that the concept of mentors in the professions is anything new. In decades past, the only way to enter into a profession was to attach yourself to a mentor, and “read the law” within a law office by serving as a clerk for a number of years until you were ready to take the bar exam. Ask any lawyer about his or her formative professional years, and you will hear the stories of the mentor, whether it was a friendly one or not.
Professional services firms have taken the concept of mentoring and formalized it, thereby somewhat manufacturing what was previously an organic relationship. In years past, a mentor and a protégé found each other through a natural process—the younger professionals would work on a project here and a project there and eventually find a senior person whom
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they enjoyed working for, and vice versa. However, it did not always work out that way. Even today, there are younger professionals who bounce from partner to partner, simply because no one can determine the best fit for them.
Currently, many firms assign the mentor and protégé to each other, often on the protégé’s first day of work. And while this is not as organic as the former system, it does have its advantages. First, it requires that some form of relationship exist, and it prevents wallf lower partners or wallf lower associates from hiding in their offices. Second, it forces protégés to work with someone to identify their goals and a plan for getting there. This is beneficial even if the goal is not necessarily a partnership or if the goal is unknown. It is one more way in which expectations can be managed. It also forces the younger professional to develop one or more career plans and to plan with contingencies. For the younger professional, this may be one of the greatest advantages to a mentoring program.
The expectations of mentoring need to be established at the beginning.
Most professionals are extremely busy and cannot afford to waste time on what they perceive to be nonbillables. However, if mentors and protégés are educated on the positive aspects of mentoring and what it brings to the firm, they can slowly be convinced to spend their resources in this very important role and function. Written guidelines should include the following, taken from Ida O. Abbott’s excellent book, The Lawyer’s Guide to Mentoring: 9
• Program purpose and objectives
• How the program objectives should be met
• How program objectives will be monitored
• How the program will be evaluated
• Responsibilities of the mentor
• Responsibilities of the associate
• How the mentoring relationship works
• Role of the program coordinator
• What to do if problems arise in the mentoring relationship
• How mentors and associates will be matched
• Duration of the mentoring relationship
• Time commitment
• How mentoring activities should be recorded on time sheets
• Confidentiality
• Budget
The advantages of an administered mentoring program are numerous, for the firm as well as the protégé. The firm can immediately begin instructing
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the professional on how it “prefers things to be done.” This indoctrination (for lack of a better term) happens at most firms, whether it is overtly admitted or not. Formalizing it through the mentoring program raises it to an institutional truth that encourages communication about what firm culture can or should be. The mentoring program also builds a tremendous amount of loyalty from the protégé to the mentor, and thereby to the firm. This above all gives retention its worth in time and resources.