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Episode 31 Buy Episode

Employee Engagement

Law as stated: 19 October 2020 What is this? This episode was published and is accurate as at this date.
Breda Diamond explains the link between employee engagement and productivity, providing tips on how to increase and maintain employee engagement for firms and businesses of all sizes.
Practice Management and Business Skills Practice Management and Business Skills
19 October 2020
Breda Diamond
NSW Ombudsman
1 hour = 1 CPD point
How does it work?
What topic(s) does this episode consider?Employee engagement, motivation and feedback
Why is this topic relevant?Law firms are facing a potential retention and happiness crisis, lagging behind other industries significantly in terms of employee engagement.  Engagement is important for many reasons. Firstly, it’s a driver of productivity. Secondly, engaged employees are less likely to leave an organisation improving retention. Thirdly, there is a positive link between engagement and well-being, engaged employees are happier.
What concepts and / or models are considered in this episode?

 

  • Employee engagement
  • Motivation
  • Employee retention
  • Accessibility
  • Organisational structures
  • SBI feedback model
What are the main points?What is engagement?

  • Engagement refers to the connection to the work and tasks an employee is completing.  Engagement is about driving discretionary effort. This is the level of effort that is above the minimum required. Discretionary effort has a positive correlation to productivity. If someone is putting in discretionary effort they are going above and beyond what is expected of them which creates and reinforces a culture of strong employee engagement.
  • Employees can be personally engaged but show some antipathy toward colleagues and dishonesty towards those they report to. Often the disconnect is between the individual and the broader team. The individual themself is engaged, but not invested in their team – which overall results in pseudo-engagement.
  • Discretionary effort is expected in the legal profession. It is expected that lawyers will work long hours and weekends but that is not sustainable without engagement.

What about motivation?

  • There are two types of motivation, extrinsic and intrinsic:
    • Extrinsic motivation refers to external sources of motivation such as pay rises, time off, bonuses, gifts, praise or avoiding punishment.
    • Intrinsic motivation comes from within the employee who is driven to achieve, produce high quality work and build trust with team members. Intrinsically motivated people get a lot of job satisfaction out of what they do. It can be challenging to motivate someone who is only driven by extrinsic factors so it’s important to try to encourage and cultivate intrinsic motivation within that person.

How does organisational structure impact engagement?

  • Typically law firms have a hierarchical structure which is an artefact of organisational culture.  In this structure, partners sit at the very top of the pyramid with graduates and legal assistants at the very bottom.
  • A hierarchical structure will impact structure – if you want to increase engagement in a hierarchical structure, consider improving accessibility and communication so that people at the bottom of the structure feel comfortable communicating and engagement with people above them in the hierarchy.  Everyone needs to both be, and be seen to be, accessible to their team.
What are the practical takeaways?
  • Engagement is needed from everyone with an organisation; in a law firm this means legal practitioners as well as legal assistants, office managers, paralegals as well as facilities, human resources, business development and tech advisors.
  • Breda provides an example of the tension that can exist between an organisation and its board of directors. The tension described by Breda is not uncommon, a CEO will often wonder how much to tell the board about what is happening within an organisation – and on the flip side the board needs to be comfortable that they are being provided with all of the information needed to effectively do their job. And as Breda mentions, the most effective boards are those that are valued by management and people working within the organisation.
  • Just like motivation, different people will feel engaged by different things. For example, some people may need to be constantly learning, or they may need positive feedback, while some need to experience meaningful interactions with their colleagues or clients to remain engaged.  For many, 2020 has been a difficult year and there is no doubt that with so many people working remotely engagement is a challenge.
  • Giving and receiving feedback can be challenging. The SBI (situation-behaviour-impact) model can assist in providing feedback. Here are a few tips:
    • For the person giving feedback: firstly you describe the situation (“at this morning’s meeting when I was presenting my findings to the team”), following by the behaviour you observed (“you took out your phone and opened Facebook”) followed by the impact on you and your team (“this made me feel like you were uninterested in my findings, it put me off whilst presenting”). And finally state the change that needs to occur (“when we have team meetings, you should try not to be distracted by your phone so that you are present and engaged”).
    • For the person receiving feedback: take the time to listen and digest the feedback. Resist the urge to respond straight away, as this can often appear defensive. Thank the provider for the feedback and, if you feel like you would like to respond, ask for some time to consider the feedback. Consider the feedback over a couple of days and then organise a time to discuss it.
Show notesSinek, Simon, Start With Why, (Penguin UK, 2011)

SBI model, Center for Creative Leadership

David Turner:

 

 

 

 

1:00

Hello and welcome to Hearsay, a podcast about Australian laws and lawyers for the Australian legal profession, my name is David Turner. As always, this podcast is proudly supported by Assured Legal Solutions, a boutique commercial law firm making complex simple.

Research has shown that law firms have difficulty engaging and retaining their staff. In 2011, global consulting firm BlessingWhite published a comprehensive report examining the dynamics of employee engagement around the world in a whole range of industries. That report revealed that less than 1/3 of employees surveyed across all industries feel engaged and specifically in the legal sector research by professional services firm Aon shows that law firms are facing a potential retention and happiness crisis, lagging behind other industries significantly in terms of employee engagement. This report also found that engagement levels varied significantly between different roles, with more junior lawyers feeling less engaged by their employers than senior lawyers. So the question remains, how do we improve employee engagement amongst lawyers especially those who are just beginning their legal career? Joining me today to talk about the many different aspects of employee engagement is Breda Diamond, head of HR at the New South Wales Ombudsman and former director of talent and diversity management at service NSW. Breda thank you so much for joining me today on Hearsay.

Breda Diamond:Thank you David.
DT:Now lots of law firms talk about employee engagement, a lot boast of high employee engagement though the research has shown that’s not necessarily the case, what is employee engagement exactly?
BD:

2:00

So when we talk about engagement we’re talking about the connection. And in employee engagement we’re talking about connection to the work. So how do we ensure that the people who come to work for us are truly engaged and connected in what they’re doing to deliver in the job that they are employed to do.
DT:And connection lends a whole range of benefits to the employer and the employee of course, retention of employees, improved efficiency and utilisation. Are there other benefits to employee engagement?
BD:That’s exactly right and when we talk about employee engagement and measuring employee engagement we’re really talking about discretionary effort. So what makes people not just turn up to work but do 110% and be there for their business, for their employee and for their teammates.
DT:And how do you measure that discretionary effort? Which is a term I love by the way I think that’s a great way of capturing that idea of 110%?
BD:

 

3:00

Yeah sure so there’s lots of different surveys that people will be familiar with, global ones, national ones and then just small little surveys that are done internally through SurveyMonkey. So there’s no great science to it as such David, it’s more about asking the questions to work out what do your people need from you, as an employer, to continue coming to work showing up every day and showing up 110%?
DT:I imagine there’s all sorts of different surveys that are deployed to try and measure or capture information about employee engagement, is there one question that you’ve found is common to all of them? Is there one question or maybe a handful of questions that are really useful in identifying whether an employee is engaged or not?
BD:

 

 

 

 

4:00

Yeah so people will tend to generally ask questions about retention around you know ‘would you be proud to tell people but you work in that particular workplace?’ And that’s the one that’s the really, for me that’s the clincher that’s the one that really says ‘would I tell people where I work?’ and ‘would I be proud to say I work there?’, because if you’ve got that connection and that crystallisation of ideas, that’s when you start to really see people showing up in a meaningful way to do meaningful work.

TIP: Now engagement is extremely important because it is a known driver of productivity.  In 2019, the ADP Research Institute found that employees who consider themselves to be part of a team are twice as likely to be engaged, and therefore more productive. This research was conducted over a three-year period focusing on 41 teams. And the research showed that finding that one third of those teams were ‘pseudo-engaged’ – meaning that these employees were often satisfied with their jobs and committed to the organisation, but showed some antipathy toward colleagues and dishonesty towards those they reported to. Often the disconnect is between the individual and the broader team. The individual themself is engaged, but not invested in the team – which overall results in pseudo-engagement, which is less than ideal obviously. I’m now going to ask Breda about the artefacts of organisational culture which is a reference to beliefs, assumptions, shared meanings, traditions and symbolism within a team or organisation – the kind of things that create engagement.

DT:When we often talk about the artefacts of an organisational culture we talk about whether people identify with their job, with their professional or with their organisation. You know, if they were to say at a party I’m a lawyer or I work at ‘X’ law firm. Is that kind of a hint of engagement?
BD:

 

 

 

 

6:00

That’s part of it but it’s also around when somebody has to go the extra mile at work. So, will they put in extra effort? Will they work on different programmes or projects not necessarily what lines up with their job description? So you know on a Friday afternoon when something’s got to get pushed out the door at 5:00 o’clock due time for delivery and the work’s not done, does the person say see you guys and go home? Or do they get in, get their hands dirty and just really sort of help people to deliver as a team. So it’s about teamwork as well, and you’ll have different levels of engagement; you can have people engaged with the actual work itself, you can have people engage with the team, so the cohesion of the team, you know being really loyal and supportive of their teammates. Or you can have people engaged with the manager where they’re really wanting to not let their manager down and they’re really wanting to do all of the pieces of work to make that manager proud of them. And then you’ll have engagement with the employer brand, where they are really wanting to do some work that relates to what the brand is talking about.
DT:

 

 

 

 

7:00

It’s a really great point actually that you can be engaged with all these different facets of the organisation but it’s not one factor. There’s the team, the manager, the brand. Hearing you describe that engagement really is about driving that discretionary effort.

TIP: This is the second time that Breda has referred to this term ‘discretionary effort’. This refers to the level of effort that is above the minimum required. Discretionary effort has a positive correlation to productivity, as you can imagine. If someone is putting in discretionary effort, then they’re going above and beyond what is expected of them which creates and reinforces a culture of strong employee engagement. 

I can immediately see why there’s a retention problem in law firms because that discretionary effort is, I suppose in the legal profession not discretionary at all, it’s not uncommon for lawyers to work very long hours, for lawyers to be expected to stay back late on a Friday when the work is not done and that is part of the job description in a way. But you can see that that won’t be done sustainably or that that can’t last, to put it another way without engagement.

BD:That’s right and you’ll see that through the different generations people will value different things. So, you know years ago people stayed with one employer for a very very long time. It was nothing unusual to have twenty, thirty, forty years of service with one employer. These days our, you know, people that are coming through careers and into the junior levels, they want more, they want different things than what previously people wanted from careers. So they want a number of careers and not just a number of employers but they may change careers, so starting out in one profession moving to another profession.
DT:

8:00

I was just about to say, far from staying in one business for their entire career it might not even be staying in the same profession which we do see in law, with both young lawyers leaving the profession as well as many people taking law as a second profession later on later in life. Now Breda you have quite a good track record when it comes to employee engagement, I’m talking of course about your work at Service NSW, which was the first public service agency to be listed in the ‘Top 10 Great Places to Work in Australia’ and that ranking is based on employee engagement scores. So it’s a measure of employee engagement and that meant that engagement levels at Service NSW were comparative to private sector companies like Atlassian, like Salesforce, Cisco the kind of tech companies that are famous for great employee engagement, that are famous for the bean bags and ping pong tables and free beer on Fridays. Now how does Service NSW cultivate such high engagement levels? Were there lots of ping pong tables?
BD:

 

9:00

 

 

 

 

 

10:00

Well that’s exactly what we didn’t have. Being a government agency, we couldn’t have the ping pong tables, we couldn’t have pay rises, we couldn’t have things that you can use in the private services to be able to engage people and motivate people to go above and beyond. If I look back on it as a case study of when I started there three years before and then where we had got to I when I actually left that employer, we were recognised in the top ten, we were #8, it was a really phenomenal achievement. And you know part of that was around Service NSW was a brand-new business. It wasn’t about trying to change culture in another business it was about starting at the beginning. So obviously when you’re in that sort of a situation where you can actually plan it out, work out what you want the business to be, it’s a very very different dynamic to when you take on an old business that’s been well established. Customer first business model and digital first. So trying really really hard to make the customer at the centre of everything that we did. And in that business the customer model was very very focused on the front line. So when I talk about the frontline I talk about the shop fronts, the service centres. And in that particular area, you know, lots of people getting acknowledgement from customers around the great work that they were doing. So very easy to drive high engagement with a high customer service model. At the back end though unfortunately it’s much much harder because at the end of the day you don’t have customers telling you you’re doing a great job, you’ve got people in the frontline saying ‘we need this from you’, ‘we need that from you’, ‘we need support with this’, ‘how can we make things better?’. So it’s how do you make sure that you don’t have a two tier business where you’ve got two tiers of engagement happening and how do you make it all level across the organisation.
DT:

11:00

I like that idea of engagement being part and parcel with, well one the customer focused business model but really the strategy of the business that it forms part of, and draws from, the very business model itself I think that’s a really interesting idea. But tell me more about that idea of engaging frontline employees differently to the back-end employees because many of our listeners are lawyers, they’re dealing with clients, but client contact and that positive feedback from clients does tend to be something that you receive as a more senior lawyer when you have more contact with the client. And junior lawyers particularly in very large firms might hardly speak to the client at all.

TIP: Now it’s important to recognise that engagement is needed from everyone within a law firm, not just the lawyers. There are many people who are integral to making a law firm operate effectively and efficiently, including legal assistants, office managers, paralegals, facilities, human resources, business development staff and technology advisors. It’s important to recognise that engagement is needed from everyone within a law firm, not just the lawyers.

BD:

12:00

Yeah so if you think about it in terms of connecting people to purpose and if I think about what family law is about. So family law is very much about trying to broker a situation for the best for all parties and trying to make sure that the children in the situation are getting the best deal possible as well. So similarly with the example of Service NSW at the back-end it was around connecting people to purpose. So that whole idea, if you’re not serving a customer, then you should be serving somebody who’s serving a customer. So that idea of customer service at the back-end, as opposed to being a number cruncher, doing budgets, being a HR person who’s getting people in the door, you know being an IT person who’s just setting up access for people, how are you actually creating purpose for those people at the back end, how are they serving the people who are serving the customer?
DT:

13:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

14:00

Yeah that’s an interesting way of thinking about the end result of your effort. I remember I was at a conference one year where Steven Gageler who’s a High Court justice was speaking, and he was speaking about purpose for commercial lawyers, for lawyers who don’t work in crime or family, they work in the area I work in which is commercial law, and spoke about the importance of lawyers as the infrastructure of business. That the law and the commercial lawyers who work in it are this critical infrastructure for how all sorts of businesses actually get things done and I felt like that was a really purposive way of describing what we do. I think if you were just thinking about the tasks; draft this contract, draft that contract, you might get a little lost and a little a little distanced from purpose, but I felt that was a really great way to describe it.

Now you’ve had tremendous success with driving engagement both at the front and back end as we discussed. But I imagine you’ve been involved in organisations or you’ve advised organisations that haven’t always had good engagement. Can you tell me about a time where you pinpointed an issue with engagement, whether that was an individual a person or a team or a larger organisational issue, how you diagnosed it and then the strategies you used to remedy it?

BD:

 

 

 

 

 

15:00

Sure, so look I might tell you a little bit about when I was on a not-for-profit board. So that was a really interesting scenario because obviously the board are separate from the organisation they’ve got that governance oversight, but they were very much disengaged from the organisation in terms of the people within the organisation. So there was almost a thinking that if the board were too involved, that the board had overstepped the mark from governance into management but then what you’re starting to not see is that connection between the board and the organisation. So really really important to get that engagement right. Very engaged organisation on the ground, you know, had received accolades from government for their work, had been given bonus payments for the work that they were doing which is very unusual in government. So really really engaged in terms of the ground, the people, the CEO a very engaging person, but the board itself was sitting out as this almost sort of set of eyes that, not so much couldn’t be trusted but more that, don’t tell them too much. If they know too much they start they might start getting into management. So, you know, because at the end of the day it’s the board who are responsible for the organisation.
DT:Yeah absolutely.
BD:Yeah, and it’s the board that has the reporting responsibilities around as a direct company.
DT:And interesting that you say that that perception was both ways, that the organisation didn’t want to tell the board too much because they might get too involved, but the board was happy to be distant.
BD:

 

 

16:00

That’s exactly right so you know how that evolved, or I was on that board for quite a number of years and, you know, at the starting point of the board it was very much that distance and that’s often about the personalities too that are part of that make up. So what you’ll see is people will often be part of a not-for-profit board because they want to put something back, they want to do some good but they don’t really have the time to be part of that structure and be, you know, fulfilling all of their duties in terms of the engagement with their organisation. So at that point what I did was I looked at the board and looked at the structure and about it being fit for purpose and who were the types of people that we needed in terms of subject matter expertise within that board structure to ensure that we had all of the bases covered. So there was somebody with an accounting background who could actually talk to the CFO. There was somebody with a people human resources background who could engage with the HR leader within the organisation. There was somebody with the commercial aspects, who could engage with the CEO. So it was about ensuring that we had a levelling up or a buddying up of people between the board and the organisation to make those initial individual connections. So no, you know it shouldn’t be something that’s seen as a threat, it should be around how do you support each other to ensure that the good work of the organisation is carrying on but also that the governance arrangements are being adhered to?
DT:And really about purpose again isn’t it that –
BD:It is.
DT:

17:00

By having that fitness for purpose and having those delineated roles; this person is responsible for oversight of HR, this person is responsible for oversight of this other aspect, giving those board members purpose in their oversight of the organisation, something that aligns with their skills.
BD:

 

 

 

 

18:00

That’s right. Where it became really interesting was the idea of remunerating the board. So, on one hand we were saying well you know if people are going to be serious about this role and do this role properly, then they need to take a day out of their workplace once a month to come to a board meeting. Not on a Saturday: Monday to Friday. So then that brought about the question of should we be remunerating board members? And it was a really interesting dilemma for the organisation where a not-for-profit was almost seen as a…I don’t want to say misuse of funds, but it was certainly seen as a waste of money, paying these board people who just had this role over here and they didn’t really need to be involved and now they’re going to become a drain on the finances. So how are we going to manage that? So a really really interesting time to talk through, to just work through all of those issues. And it took quite a number of years but after a while the value of the board was seen. So they were the people who could connect people to other people in business and communities. So it was actually a role around advocacy there, a role around networking, a role around fundraising. So they started to see much more value than just being this oversight group.
DT:And we were talking before about those different facets of engagement. That it’s not engagement with the organisation as a whole but engagement with the manager or with the team and it sounds like there the board benefited from greater engagement with the organisation and then the organisation benefited from greater engagement with the board, they could see the purpose of the board and that kind of justified the expense of remuneration.
BD:

 

19:00

That’s right.

TIP: What Breda has just described here is a tension between an organisation and its board of directors. Now a CEO, or Chief Executive Officer, is responsible for the management of an organisation, but the board is responsible for the overall governance and strategic direction of the organisation, with an ultimate focus on organisational performance and compliance. Board members who have a management role within the organisation are often referred to as ‘executive directors’ – whereas, ‘non-executive directors’ are usually external and independent, sitting only on the board. The tension described by Breda isn’t uncommon, a CEO will often wonder how much to tell the board about what is happening within an organisation – on the flip side the board needs to be comfortable that they are being provided with all of the information needed to effectively do their job. And as Breda has mentioned, the most effective boards are those that are valued by management and people working within the organisation.

DT:

20:00

I want to turn now to the professional services context because professionals are a particular kind of employee, they’re very well trained, they might often have an identity with the profession in the abstract rather than their organisation specifically. Is there a different way to motivate and engage professionals?
BD:

 

 

 

 

21:00

That was a lesson I learnt many years ago when I worked for myself. So I had my own business for 10 years and in that time I employed a number of consultants to work with me and we were mainly going in and advising organisations on human resource matters. And I had this absolutely brilliant woman that worked for me at the time, she had a policy Masters, she was a really really strong professional. And one day she said to me: ‘you know Breda I love working for you, but working for you is making me fat’. I was like what?! What does that mean? And what she was actually saying to me was, ‘the work is to dry. I’m not engaging with enough people, it’s a policy job that I’m doing, I live in the Blue Mountains, I’m sitting up here at my desk, I’m not interacting with anybody, I’m smashing out policies and we’re doing great work for the organisations, but I’m not fulfilled. It’s not meaningful enough for me because I’m not engaging with enough people, and because I’m not engaging with enough people and I’m sitting in my house doing this high quality work, I’m at the fridge every four hours.’ So that’s basically the crux of what she was saying and I just think that’s a really interesting thing to think back on, particularly where we’re at this point in time where we have a number of our workforces working from home because of the Covid-19 situation.
DT:Yeah, visiting the fridge every couple of hours is definitely something familiar with working from home.
BD:

 

 

22:00

Yeah so I just thought that was really really interesting to talk through what that person needed from me. So I was providing all of the things around support, the work, all of that but she needed something else for me. So what I learned from that is that you have to really understand your people as individuals but also as teams, but particularly individuals because what might motivate one person or engage one person, will not work for another person. So for some people it’s about learning new things all the time, that’s what stimulates them, that’s what keeps them engaged. For other people they’ve got lots of other things going on in their life, they don’t live to work, they turn up to work as a means to an end but they really want to have more things in their life, so they are happy to have systems and follow policy and do all of the things that they need to do but not live at work. So how do you then make sure that all of those people are doing what needs to be done and how are you motivating each of them differently?
DT:

 

 

23:00

That example that you gave is one that I’m sure is a common story in law firms where an internally motivated professional sees the purpose in their work, sees the value in their work, and they can do the work to a high quality and put in that effort but the engagement problem might be coming from somewhere else but that purpose is definitely the foundation stone to engagement but if there’s something else driving that disengagement I suppose, you have to identify that unique factor for that person
BD:

 

 

 

 

 

 

24:00

What I did in that instance, was I just made sure that everybody came to the office one day a week. It didn’t matter where they were working the rest of the week, they needed to come into the office one day a week. And it’ll be interesting to see what happens with the Covid return to work frameworks where people are starting to get used to working remotely and how do you balance bringing people back into offices, and to see what sort of rules or culture evolves around that. But you know that was one of the things, bring people in one day a week but when they come in make it about fun. So would’ve been easy to sort of fill up that day with meetings, fill up that day with workshops, back-to-back all day long but there has to be some downtime in there for people as well, particularly if they’re saying that what’s important for them is around the social aspect of work, the connection with work. So when people would come in the first 20 minutes was chit-chat. Now that might seem like a bit of a waste of time or a little bit unnecessary but it’s that chit chat that when people put their head down and start they just absolutely you know work so hard because they’ve had a chance to talk to you and you’ve talked to them and you’re interested in what’s going on in their life and you know you’re getting a bit more of a connection to them as a person.
DT:Now we’ve talked about the connection between engagement and organisational culture already today and about how engagement can be an artefact of culture whether one identifies with the organisation when you tell someone what you do at a party. And organisational culture’s been under spotlight in recent years, culture was the subject of a number of findings in the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking Superannuation Financial Services Industry, and specifically in the legal sector in recent years we’ve seen WorkSafe investigations into law firms over complaints of overwork and exhaustion of young lawyers and a culture of overwork. What is the link between a firm’s corporate culture and employee engagement?
BD:

25:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

26:00

Yeah so look that’s a really interesting dilemma to have to be honest David. So, culture really is just how things are done around here. So you’re really really relying on your manager, your people leaders, to pave the way and role model the culture that the organisation wants to set. So generally organisations don’t tend to just wake up one day and say right, ‘we’re going to start having a culture of engagement and that’s what we’re going to have and it’s fantastic now this is the new strategy, it’s a culture of engagement.’ That just doesn’t happen automatically, it takes years for that to happen and you know generally it takes about 10 years to build a culture. So once you start to identify the type of culture that you want to have in your organisation. So in the case of the young lawyers, if you’re wanting to say, ‘right we want to retain young lawyers, we don’t want people going elsewhere because they feel overworked or exhausted or disengaged from the organisation. So we want to treat our young lawyers better, we want to make sure that they stay with us that they don’t go to the competition or they don’t leave the sector, they don’t leave the profession because it’s too hard or you know it’s not worth it for them.’ So to do that takes many years of repetitive actions and those repetitive actions are policies, they’re processes, changing the management thinking, changing young people’s thinking, so engaging them when they come in the door, having opportunities for them. So there’s a number of ways that you could do it but there’s no one way and it doesn’t just happen overnight, it can take many many years. And interestingly you can destroy a culture very very quickly, which is quite sad in a sense, when you think of how long it takes to build.
DT:Hard to build up and easy to damage. Can you give us an example of that kind of cultural change that you’ve driven in your experience? I mean perhaps Service New South Wales is a good example?
BD:

 

27:00

 

 

 

 

 

28:00

Yeah so Service NSW, look, one of the really interesting programmes that I worked on there that I set up and developed was a refugee employment programme. And that was really around a government commitment to employing 100 refugees across the whole of New South Wales government in a 18 month time period. So you know a little organisation like Service New South Wales who had 2000 employees at the time, you know, you could hope for maybe one or two refugees employed. Somewhere like Transport NSW where you have 30,000 employees you obviously would be able to get a lot more traction. But the interesting thing was that it didn’t actually happen that way. It was the work at Service New South Wales that created the momentum across the public service. So at Service NSW we were able to employ 47 refugees, which was a phenomenal number, within an 18 month period. How that was able to happen was being able to connect managers and teams in the service centres to the value of bringing in somebody from a diverse background. So for instance Wetherill Park Service Centre, a thousand customers come through that door everyday. They’re you know a very strong demographic of Iranian, Syrian people from all of those Middle Eastern backgrounds. Really really interesting what the impact for customers is if you can see somebody from your culture greeting you when you come in the door. So the experience of government in those war-torn countries is not necessarily the same as the experience in government here.
DT:Yeah absolutely and we’ve spoken about that on the show before In the in the migration and refugee context that even dealing with the courts or dealing with a lawyer there’s not always the assumption or expectation that courts and lawyers are independent of government. And that cultural change which had an incredible tangible result in employing 47 refugees in service NSW, how did you drive that?
BD:

29:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

30:00

So look one of the critical factors there was around acceptance within the team because if you can imagine a really really busy environment so a thousand customers running at you, coming through the door, wanting that quick turnaround of service, so people having to really deliver, get people out, get people sorted, get everything organised and out the door with a good customer satisfaction rating. So Services NSW has a 97% customer satisfaction rating which is phenomenal, but if you think about it if your team member is not there on board with you 100% and is letting the team down that’s a really really difficult place for the team to be. So one of the things that I did in setting up the programme was to ensure that the refugee programme was a supernumerary. So they were an additional staff member. So it really took away that burden on the team’s performance so they didn’t have to think ‘this person’s taking up a spot where we would normally have a high performer assisting with the customer experience.’ So it’s putting little pieces together like that and really understanding what you’re trying to do. So for me it was very much not just about that person having a job from the refugee community, it was also about them having a very positive impact on themselves, on their lives, on their self-esteem and on how they could actually become part of the fabric of Australia, how they could become part of the community and contribute back to the community. Because that’s what engagement is all about, it’s about contribution, how do you contribute in your workplace? And for that to really be effective, the team has to be supportive and on board as well. So information sharing is really really important. Being fair and transparent when somebody comes true if they make a mistake. How do you correct that mistake so that the person is not walking away feeling like they’ve done something wrong? So the team being buddies and mentors, having a real system around that programme to make sure that it was successful
DT:

 

31:00

You mention that idea that the additional employee was a supernumerary so that there wasn’t a perception that they were taking up the role of a high performer. Did you see, or was there evidence that there was that misconception or perception early on that teams didn’t view employees from refugee backgrounds as high performers? And that you kind of had to build your strategy around proving that assumption wrong?
BD:

 

 

 

 

 

32:00

Yeah see so this is where culture can start to work against you. We want really good people working for us in the organisation. So then what that creates is a little bit of a disconnect with some of the other diversity portfolios. So the supernumerary was one aspect, but it was also about understanding the story, so if you can really understand the story of this person that’s coming in the door and really understand that they’re not you know all of the media portrayals, that those media portrayals are broken down. They haven’t arrived here by boat, they’re not taking our jobs, you know all of all sorts of societal thinking is broken away. And it’s about the person, the person’s coming in they want to contribute to their family. As a starting point I set it up that we had it for a six month programme and the whole idea was this is for the refugee to be able to get a local reference. It’s not about working here longer term, this is about giving somebody a foot in the door; getting people off of Centrelink for a six-month period and allowing them to be part of the community. So that was a really strong driver for the teams to make it successful because it was time bound and it was a supernumerary. So they could still get on with their work but they also saw real value in what they were doing for that person’s family and that person’s settlement in Australia. Interestingly what the teams noticed was that the refugees were much more eager to make it successful than they had expected. So we had people wanting to keep their intern on at the end of the programme saying ‘no they’re fantastic they’re really really good there actually showing up some of our other people, their KPIs are excellent, nothing’s a problem, they’re always smiling, they’re just so grateful to have the opportunity. How can we keep them? How can we make this work?’
DT:That was kind of…design of that intervention was the wedge that you used to achieve the more permanent change.
BD:

33:00

But when you think about it if you sit down and you plan out the whole programme and you think that whole idea of ‘I’ll just set it all up and then we’ll start it and this is where we’ll be in five years,’ it would never have happened.
DT:No.
BD:

 

 

 

 

 

34:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

35:00

So it’s about taking chances and just letting things develop organically. Put the risk frameworks around it so make sure that you’re setting things up and watching and listening and learning and getting feedback along the way. So in terms of changing organisational culture and if you’re looking at you know some of the issues that were just talked about around retention with young lawyers you know start, start trying different things, start to see what’s starting to work. So you know get some programmes in place, put some development opportunities in place, you know give people some other things that are very popular; volunteer days, where people can go and work in an organisation of their choice for a day paid by the company to be released but they’re actually doing something that’s meaningful to them. So what are the sorts of things that motivate people to stay with an employer and start to roll those out, in small pieces, but you’ll get to know really quickly what’s successful and what’s not.

TIP: Did you know there are two kinds of motivation? On the one hand you have extrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation refers to external sources of motivation liek pay rises, time off, bonuses, gifts from your employer, praise, positive feedback or avoiding punishment. Intrinsic motivation on the other hand comes from within the employee; a drive to achieve, a drive to produce high quality work, pride in one’s own work and building trust with team members. Intrinsically motivated people get satisfaction out of what they do. It can be challenging to motivate someone who is only driven by extrinsic factors so it’s important to try to encourage and cultivate intrinsic motivation within that person.

I’m now going to ask Breda about organisational structures within law firms, in particular those hierarchical, pyramidal structures that we’re so familiar with, and what impact structure has on engagement. As a reminder, a hierarchical structure has a chain of command from the top (in a law firm that’s the partners) to the bottom (which could be graduates, first-year lawyers, paralegals, legal assistants, basically everyone else).

DT:Now speaking about organisational culture in the law firm context in particular hierarchy and hierarchical structure is a big artefact of organisational culture and in law firms there is an exceptionally hierarchical structure in many of them with partners at the very top of the pyramid and graduates at the very bottom. Tell me a bit about the role that hierarchy plays in engagement.
BD:Look that’s really interesting ’cause it’s not just law firms, lots of organisations even the ones that claim to be flat have hierarchy within the flatness.
DT:It could be informal power as well.
BD:

36:00

That’s exactly right, that’s exactly right. Remembering that culture is ‘how things are done around here’. So if there’s no open door policy at the top you know and you might think back to law firms that you’ve worked in where you start to see, ‘oh well that person actually worked quite differently as a partner to other people’, they always knew who was in the office they, spoke to people they had an open door policy, they weren’t unreachable. So it’s interesting to look back and see the people that we would consider it have been leaders and how they operated.
DT:Sounds like accessibility is a big part of breaking down hierarchy.
BD:

 

 

 

37:00

It is, it is and that’s…and accessibility and communication. I think about some of the places I’ve worked where if I got an email from the person at the top I’d be petrified, I’d think I’d done something wrong. And I remember one time I worked in school and I was the school counsellor and I got called into the principal’s office one day ’cause she wanted to talk to me about a child protection matter, but I automatically went back to that 13 year old girl in high school that had been called to the principal’s office. So I’m sitting there, had absolutely no confidence in myself, I had turned into this little girl that was like ‘oh I’m in trouble’ and I wasn’t in trouble at all. So sometimes too it’s about our perceptions and how we react to things. So you know and that’s one of the things I do see with younger generations, and you might be seeing this with some of the younger lawyers. They have no problems emailing or calling up a partner, but how does the partner react to that? You know, is that where the cultural shift needs to happen? But then are they then seen as too forward or unprofessional or maybe you know that they don’t have enough respect for their people who have worked their way to the top. And so how do you change that mindset at the top of the tree?
DT:How do you promote accessibility?
BD:That’s right.
DT:And how do you do that because I suppose on the one hand there is an exercise in changing perceptions at the bottom, and again I’m talking in hierarchical terms.
BD:That’s exactly right.
DT:But I imagine it’s a much harder exercise, probably much more important exercise, to change it at the top
BD:

 

38:00

That’s right, and often that’s where people will think the change is not required. They’ll think that they’re doing everything right and they’re leading the organisation and they’re putting all of the things in place. But it’s about being able to turn that mirror around and actually look at yourself and think well ‘how do I show up for work every day?’, ‘am I really accessible?’, ‘what are the things that I do that tell people I’m accessible?’. So, ‘do I have a newsletter that goes out?’, or ‘do I just, you know, have a stand-up meeting with people?’, ‘do I talk to people when I walk into the kitchen?’. When I worked for myself, one of the councils that I worked with told me about one of their very senior staff who always went out to the basement because they were petrified of having to talk to the staff on their way out in case the staff asked for something that they would have to say no to or that you know might ask a curly question. So they’d snake out the back, down the basement, then speed out in the car as fast as they could every evening. I just thought it was a really strange way to operate.
DT:

39:00

Well it’s interesting isn’t it because trying to avoid saying no sounds like a way to promote harmony, but of course not being available to even ask the question is almost worse.
BD:Exactly, exactly. And so think about it in our in our big corporate high rises where there’s only so many car spaces, are the people at the top there coming out the front door, catching public transport like everybody else where they’re accessible in that regard, where they’re seen, their visible, or are they going down the lift to the basement and out. So it’s just a very simple thing but again it’s more than accessibility; its visibility. How are they visible in the organisation? How do people know that they can connect with them?
DT:Could you give us an example about a time that you’ve seen an issue with communication in an organisation and how you change that in a way that improved engagement?
BD:

 

 

40:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

41:00

So look, really one of the interesting aspects of communication is around how do we feed things back to people? How do we close the loop on information? So often communication is one way where we as managers or leaders will tell people what’s going on, but how do we actually get information from them around what they think about what we’re telling them? So there’s lots of little strategies that can be put into place and what was really really successful at Service NSW was ‘the circle of service’. So the circle service was a programme whereby there was a really really strong belief from the leadership team and the culture of the organisation was that the people who experienced the problem were the best people to solve the problem. That idea of if you were there and you’re thinking ‘Oh God I wish they would do something about this’, you probably know what the something is. An example would be where lots of different forms together a number of pieces of information to process something in a service centre. So how could you consolidate those forms into one form so you’re not asking the same questions three or four times in different formats, and get it in one way? So in that circle of service model,  employees can give you the solution and then we had almost like a committee that would sit and through the dilemmas, talk through the proposed solution, and 9 times out of 10 they were really easy fixes, they were really easy things that you could put into place by changing a piece of policy, by putting a new process in place by just sending out a communication to everybody to say this is what we’re going to do now. So giving people that opportunity to solve problems for themselves rather than waiting for managers to do something different and they may not have the time or they may overcook it. They might, you know, think we need to put in this whole big programme when it’s really just one form or one policy.
DT:

 

 

42:00

And I like that idea that it, you know, doesn’t mean that there’s no governance or oversight or responsibility there’s still oversight of those solutions but the solutions are generated at the level that’s experiencing them. That also touches on another topic I wanted to ask you about which is feedback, both giving and receiving feedback in both directions with someone higher up in the hierarchy and with and from someone who’s lower in the hierarchy. I guess the colloquial terms are ‘managing up’ and ‘managing down’. Particularly for junior lawyers who I think struggle to give feedback to partners or senior associates especially in those very early years when you feel like you don’t know anything. Do you have any tips for having difficult conversations with a person that you report to?
BD:

 

 

 

Yeah so look it’s always really really helpful if you’ve got a little bit of a relationship beforehand so often you’ll see people who go in boots and all with the criticism and that’s exactly how it’s interpreted: as criticism. So having an already organised relationship, if you want to call it credit in the bank, you know it’s much much more palatable for somebody to hear feedback. And also if it’s constructive, so it can be depersonalised away from the person and be more around the customer or the organisation or a work, health and safety issue. So if you can take it away from the person then that’s always a much easier way to present the information as well.
DT:And more about behaviour than personality or…
BD:That’s right.
DT:Or, than traits, right?
BD:

43:00

Yeah and timing, timing is everything. So dropping the bomb at 4:30 on a Friday evening just before you’re all about to go out for you know Friday drinks.
DT:Yeah probably not the best time.
BD:Probably not a great idea. So you know thinking about those sorts of things and planning it and simplifying it as much as possible. What are you actually trying to say and why is it important? Why do you want to say that? Why do you want to give that feedback? So you know and often it’s about personalising it to you. So when I hear you say X, Y, Z, I feel X, Y, Z. So what that does is it just takes away that criticism of the person but also gives them an opportunity to understand why you’re actually raising it.
DT:Yeah understand the impact of the behaviour that you’re talking about.
BD:

 

44:00

That’s right.

TIP: A useful and simple model for providing feedback is the SBI feedback model, which stands for situation-behaviour-impact. First, you describe the situation (for example, at this morning’s meeting), then you describe the behaviour that you observed (for example, you took your phone out of your bag and I saw you replying to your emails) followed by the impact that on you and your team (for example, that made me feel like you were uninterested in what I had to say and it put me off while I was presenting to the rest of the team). And then finally, you state the change or the different behaviour that you want to see occur (for example, when we have team meetings, can you please try not to be distracted by your phone so that you’re present and engaged). That SBI feedback model was created by the Center for Creative Leadership – and we’ll include a link to the summary of the model in the show notes.

DT:You mentioned that it helps particularly if you’re having a conversation with someone higher up in the hierarchy than you, that it helps to have some influence capital in the bank, to have that relationship.
BD:That’s right.
DT:

45:00

I imagine particularly in a hierarchical organisation, that it’s really the responsibility of the person who is higher up to try and cultivate that relationship because it’s hard as a junior lawyer to try and cultivate a relationship with a partner…
BD:That’s right yeah.
DT:…who’s probably a very time-poor person. As a more senior lawyer what tips do you have for someone who is trying to make themselves accessible, who’s trying to make themselves available to a relationship with the people that report to them so that they can get that feedback?
BD:

 

 

 

46:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

So look one of the things that I’ve done in the past is where I’ve had you know coffee time. So what I’ve done is I’ve opened up my diary to whoever wanted to book in for 15 minutes for a chat and I would say that I’m available for mentoring, I’m available for discussion, I’m available for whatever you would like to discuss. And it’s not a managerial discussion but it’s more around any type of advice and opening that up for junior people. So that just makes it really clear to the more junior staff in your organisation that you’re not sitting up top in an ivory tower and that you’ve got no understanding of what happens on the ground. That’s another thing that’s really really important: to walk the floors. Get in among people, you know drop by. I can remember when I first started working in government and a very very senior person in government turned up to my desk and just walked around, and he was the head of a whole department. I just froze, he asked me a question, I gave a silly answer because I was almost star struck, he wasn’t a star but I was like really thinking ‘Oh my God what’s he going to ask? So having that familiarity of face kind of stops people from being nervous or worried about what you’re doing, and if you’re watching them or whatever. Just walking around, talking to people, you know, putting it out there could be that you put something in your newsletter, you know, this is what I’m trying to do anybody got any ideas about how this could work? Having an email box that people can just send suggestions to, that’s a really great way of doing things as well.
DT:You mentioned a couple of times this idea of having a newsletter that you send out to the team, could you tell me more about that idea?
BD:

47:00

 

 

 

 

 

48:00

Yeah so look it’s obviously the larger the organisation the harder it is to be accessible, but if you can send out a communication on a regular basis that’s not just prescriptive and bureaucratic, but you know gives some personal connection to everybody in the organisation. So you know for instance people will maybe say a little bit about ‘hope you all had a great weekend, I spent you know, Saturday with my dog in the park’ and put in a little picture of their fluffy dog. So what it does is it gives people that idea that you actually know that person better than you do, because you know 9 times out of 10 you’re not going to be connected on social media to somebody that’s you know a senior person in your organisation. At best you might be connected to them on LinkedIn and so you really don’t have any insight into them as a person or as another human being who’s there trying to do the best they can every day at work and take the organisation forward. So newsletters are really really good way and they don’t have to be lengthy, and they can be set up in a digital way where you can just click on a couple of things, you can see some ways that the head of education sends out alerts on LinkedIn where he’ll post something that’s not really connected to education. Or he might say “this is a great book that I’ve read” and put like a little review and a link to the book. But it’s not random, but it’s not about his work. So again you’re starting to see more and more of the person. So giving people insight into the person.
DT:Sounds like visibility is kind of a prerequisite to accessibility isn’t it?
BD:Cause if you can see it, you can be it.
DT:Yeah well said, and I suppose from visibility you can gain accessibility and from accessibility you can drive engagement. And I suppose the engagement we’re talking about there specifically is engagement between the manager and the reports. But does that also drive engagement with the organisation as a whole?
BD:

49:00

It does because people will generally trust what their manager is saying, so it doesn’t really matter what’s coming from the very very top. But if your manager is not echoing that message then people start to get cynical or you know don’t believe the leadership. So it starts to disengage people. So really really important that manager capability is top of your order in terms of the work that you’re wanting to do around developing people. Making sure you’ve got the right people in those manager roles because they’re the people who will drive engagement in that team. And the teams above them will drive engagement in that team. And so it’s really like jigsaws, they all start to fit together and then you get one holistic engaged workforce but it happens at the team level.
DT:

 

50:00

Yeah I think that’s definitely a familiar idea to lawyers who’ve worked in large law firms that there might be teams with high engagement and teams with very low engagement. And that might not necessarily be engagement driven by identification with the brand of the firm, it might be identification with being a part of that team but that’s where the big differences in engagement lie.
BD:And you’ll often hear people say that people don’t leave companies, they leave managers.
DT:Yeah I have heard that.
BD:

51:00

So what you might see if somebody wants to move to another part of the organisation and if you can do that in terms of retention, that’s brilliant, that’s so good because you get to keep that investment in that person. But 9 times out of 10 if it’s a terrible experience they’ll leave the firm as well. So they’ll move to another organisation all together.
DT:Yeah. We’ve spoken about engagement in a whole different range of ways today, we’ve spoken about engagement with managers with direct reports, with the organisation as a whole. We’ve spoken about the role of communication in engagement, we spoke about the role of culture engagement diversity and engagement. IBf one of our listeners was a manager in a law firm and wanted to start their journey on having a more engaged team, what do you think the first thing that they should do is?
BD:

51:00

 

 

 

 

52:00

I think the first thing they should do is ask the team. So don’t go away and sit in a little ivory tower and work out what your engagement strategy is because you need to make sure that it’s fit for purpose for your team. Ask the team what they need from you in terms of engagement. How do they want to connect? How do they want to be treated? What sort of work do they want to be doing in the future? Is it the same as what they’re doing now? So asking all of those questions and that’s something that depending on what sort of level of trust you have with people in the team that might have to be a survey, SurveyMonkey, or it could be that you can have a focus group where you can sit people down and talk to them. If you feel like as a manager you’re not even there yet where you can sit people down and ask them, then get somebody else to ask them. Bring in somebody who can engage with the team to get the feedback, ‘cause the important thing is the feedback. Understand what they need from you so that you can give it to them.
DT:And start as you mean to go on I suppose, if your…
BD:That’s exactly right.
DT:…if your end goal is engagement, start with engagement.
BD:

 

 

 

 

 

53:00

Yeah and acknowledge that you don’t have all the answers. That’s really really important. I can remember in one government department that I worked in, things weren’t really going according to plan, there was lots of change happening and I was starting to feel like I kinda didn’t really, you know, I was in a bit of uncharted waters. And so I sat the team down and I said to them, ‘I’m so sorry I feel like I’m not giving you guys what you need to take us as a business unit through this storm.’ But people were really appreciative that I apologised and said to them ‘I don’t have all the answers. Tell me what I can do to work through this.’ It was a stressful environment which it often can be in legal firms as well where you’re time pressured, trying to get the outcomes for clients, so it can be quite a high pressure environment. So it is about really ensuring that when you are sitting there is that you’re being as authentic and as real as possible because people know when people are being hoodwinked. So saying ‘what do you need me to do’ and they know that you’re probably going to go away and not do that, that just deflates people further. So it’s trying to be real and trying to be humane and trying to be genuine.
DT:Again coming back to that accessibility.
BD:That’s exactly right.
DT:Breda thank you so much for joining us today on Hearsay.
BD:Thank you.
DT:

 

 

 

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55:00

You’ve been listening to Hearsay The Legal Podcast. I’d like to thank our guest Breda Diamond for coming on the show. Now if you liked this episode about employee engagement, try listening to my interview with Milena Milojevic next which is about the related topic of organisational development and change management. Or if you’re looking for something a little different, listen to my interview with lawyer and breach coach Reece Corbett-Wilkins from Clyde and Co where we talk about managing cyber incidents and data breaches. If you’re an Australian legal practitioner, you can claim 1 continuing professional development point for listening to this episode. Whether an activity entitles you to claim a CPD unit is self-assessed, but we think that this episode constitutes an activity in the practice management and business skills field. If you’ve claimed 5 CPD points for audio content already this CPD year, you might need to access our multimedia content to claim further points from listening to Hearsay. So visit htlp.com.au for more information on claiming and tracking your points on our website. The Hearsay team is Tim Edmeades, our audio engineer, Kirti Kumar our chief researcher, Araceli Robledo our business development manager, Zahra Wilson our social media coordinator, and me, David Turner. Nicola Cosgrove is our executive producer and mastermind. Hearsay The Legal Podcast is proudly supported by Assured Legal Solutions – making complex simple. You can find all of our episodes as well as summary papers, transcripts, quizzes and more at htlp.com.au. That’s HTLP for Hearsay The Legal Podcast.com.au. Thanks for listening.