Over the last two years, Fletchers Solicitors has grown from 90 employees to more than 340. To support this growth and engage staff with the organisation’s values and goals, Fletchers has defined its core values and developed a reward and benefits strategy that embodies and celebrates these.
The law firm has incorporated its four core values, trust, innovation, performance, and development, into its recruitment and performance management process, as well as its reward and recognition initiative, the Love awards.
The Love awards, which stand for Live Our Values Every day, is a peer-nominated recognition scheme that rewards employees who have demonstrated actions and behaviours in line with the organisation’s values. Winners receive a Love2shop voucher and are announced by the organisation’s chief executive.
Sara Duxbury, head of people, says: “Even though we’ve gone from 90 staff to 342 in two years, our chief executive still does a monthly brief to all staff in person. He will announce our Love Awards winners, as well as deliver commercial updates.”
Fletchers also celebrates team effort and performance through team activities. These vary according to the team, ranging from group trips to the cinema, to team lunches, to breakout and escape room style-games. “It’s not just that they get a mention and an award, we always try to think of something that the team will enjoy,” says Duxbury.
The organisation also offers training and development opportunities for staff. Duxbury says: “Through things such as funded training, people are staying with us and investing in us because we’ve invested in them. It also leads to more people with more knowledge staying in the business, which adds up to meeting KPIs [key performance indicators], higher productivity, and so on.”
As it grows, the organisation continues to take steps to support the mental and physical wellbeing of its staff and to provide an environment that enables employees to maintain a good work-life balance. This includes the provision of benefits such as a health cash plan, flexi-time and early finishes, free fruit, and an employee assistance programme (EAP). Managers highlight benefits such as the EAP in one-to-one sessions, so that employees know that support is available and are aware of how they can access it.
In May 2016, Fletchers enhanced its health and wellbeing offering with the introduction of mental health training for managers, subsidised gym membership, and a communications approach designed to encourage staff to think about their health and wellbeing. In October 2016, the organisation also introduced free flu jabs for staff.
As a result of the organisation’s efforts, absence rates fell from a high of 3.5% in August 2015 to 1.24% in 2016. The firm has a retention rate of approximately 88% and was named in The Sunday Times’ 100 Best Companies to Work For list for the first time in 2016, with a 90% response rate among staff.
“We try to show who we are as an organisation through the benefits that we offer,” adds Duxbury.