Many law firms created adoption benefits in the 1990’s to correspond to increasing maternity and child care benefits. Although large corporations have continued to be active supporters, interest in many law firms waned until recently. The renewed interest seems to have occurred as firms seek to tweak their benefits package for competitive purposes. The benefits range from time off to cash payments to balance what is perceived as an inequity with health care maternity benefits. For more information and sample policies go to the web site of the Dave Thomas Foundation at www.davethomasfoundation.org.
What’s the Best Way to Pay Employees?
The age old debate continues - both raises and bonuses are effective for motivating people, but which is better for eliciting top performance? Some interesting results were discovered by Michael Sturman, a professor at Cornell. Studying service industry employees in 35 countries, Sturman discovered:
How people were paid was more important than how much they were paid in relation to market rates. Employees paid above the market rate were more likely to improve future performance. Conversely, people paid below the market rate tended to decrease performance in the future.
Employees receiving a large merit raise were more likely to improve performance than employees receiving an equal amount in the form of a bonus. In fact, the effect of a 1% merit increase was equal to a 3% bonus.
Tying pay to performance by making merit raises contingent on performance had no effect on performance, but tying a bonus to performance had a strong effect.
Combinations of merit pay and bonuses seem to have the greatest impact. Increasing the average raise from 2% to 3% caused only a 2.2% increase in performance. But, if both raises and bonus were increased, regardless of the amount, resulted in a 19% performance increase.
If you would like a free pdf of the complete results of this study simply request it by sending an email (bob@LRGLLC.com) or phone (1-800-688-4147).
Generation Y Renews Interest in Volunteerism
Good news for law firm pro bono programs. A survey of 1,000 professional 18 to 26 year olds found that nearly two-thirds would prefer working for an employer that allows them to contribute their talents to nonprofit organizations. After decades of declining membership in service organizations such as Kiwanis and Masons and difficulty finding workers for community based initiatives, this could represent a dramatic turn around. The 2007 Deloitte & Touche survey found that 80% of respondents wanted to donate their skills and perform work for charitable causes rather than just donate money. Three-quarters of surveyed Gen Ys thought that employers should use volunteerism as a professional development tool.
For a free sample volunteerism policy, contact Legal Resource Group by email at bob@LRGLLC.com or phone (1-800-688-4147).
Team Evaluations
A growing trend in law firms is the creation of profit pools within practice groups where the performance of the overall group effects individual compensation. Not surprisingly, a few firms have implemented similar programs for staff functions.
The performance of groups such as accounting and billing or secretarial groupings requires that the entire team coordinate their activities and work toward the overall good of the firm. As one firm’s office administrator told us, “With individual evaluations, as long as a secretary keeps the assigned lawyers happy, he or she can pretty well do what they want. It’s murder trying to get overflow work done.” With team evaluations there is recognition of both individual and group performance. Other HR Directors told us it was a natural fold in to their 360 evaluations.
