Is increasing wages or cutting hours enough to ensure staff retention?

Faced with an exo­dus of tal­ent from their indus­try, even the most con­ser­v­a­tive of cor­po­rate law firms are think­ing about adopt­ing inno­v­a­tive recruit­ment and reten­tion tac­tics. Take mag­ic-cir­cle mem­ber Clif­ford Chance, for instance. Jonathan Kew­ley, the co-head of its tech prac­tice, recent­ly sub­mit­ted an emo­ji-punc­tu­at­ed plan to the part­ners that rec­om­mend­ed sev­er­al nov­el mea­sures. These includ­ed bring­ing in a four-day week, spon­sor­ing employ­ees to pur­sue “pas­sion projects and hob­bies” and allow­ing peo­ple to take “micro-retreats every six weeks in cool places we might not have thought of.”

The poli­cies that Kew­ley pro­posed would be over­seen by a senior exec­u­tive assum­ing the new role of chief hap­pi­ness offi­cer. The incum­bent would bring in a host of fur­ther reten­tion mea­sures, such as ensur­ing that employ­ees receive the lat­est books by their favourite authors on pub­li­ca­tion. 

Anoth­er of his sug­ges­tions includ­ed remov­ing the job title ‘trainee’. Giv­en that start­ing salaries for Clif­ford Chance trainees are in the region of £50,000, this pro­pos­al – along­side all the oth­er rec­om­mend­ed changes – is a strong indi­ca­tion that pay is not all that mat­ters to employ­ees. 

Although some col­leagues of the part­ner who told the Lon­don Evening Stan­dard that Kewley’s plan was “utter­ly delud­ed” would endorse that ver­dict, it’s a sign that there may be a rev­o­lu­tion afoot in work­ing con­di­tions and induce­ments even in the high­est-paid indus­tries.

Many firms have found that the flex­i­ble work­ing regimes they have been oblig­ed to adopt since the first nation­al Covid lock­down was imposed in 2020 haven’t reduced the qual­i­ty of their out­put. So says Nic Marks, who worked as a sta­tis­ti­cian study­ing qual­i­ty of life for 25 years, includ­ing as an advis­er to both Labour and Tory gov­ern­ments, before co-found­ing work­place data com­pa­ny Fri­day Pulse. 

“If you have a client that’s pay­ing you for your employ­ees’ time, it won’t want to buy time when they are knack­ered. It wants to pay for their best work,” Marks stress­es.

To con­tin­ue deliv­er­ing work of that stan­dard, employ­ees want to retain the flex­i­bil­i­ty they were grant­ed dur­ing the ini­tial phase of the Covid cri­sis. Indeed, they are active­ly seek­ing employ­ers that are offer­ing staff the most free­dom to do their work where and when it best suits them.

Flexa Careers, a plat­form where employ­ers can adver­tise only gen­uine­ly flex­i­ble jobs, start­ed oper­at­ing in Feb­ru­ary 2020. It has since attract­ed more than 400,000 users. 

For Mol­ly John­son-Jones, one of Flexa’s co-founders, the busi­ness was born of neces­si­ty. In 2016, aged 26, she was work­ing at an invest­ment bank when her career was derailed by an auto-immune ill­ness that would at times ren­der her unable to walk. Instead of let­ting her work from home when she need­ed to, the bank’s response was to offer her a set­tle­ment pack­age and the door.

Her result­ing search for a more sup­port­ive employ­er led her to cre­ate a resource to help oth­ers in a sim­i­lar posi­tion. 

“One user we helped now lives in the moun­tains and has sky­div­ing as a hob­by,” says John­son-Jones, who reports that 86% of Flexa’s users are search­ing for employ­ers that oper­ate a ‘work from any­where’ regime. 

“They can make a pri­ma­ry search – for accoun­tan­cy jobs, say – but they can also make a sec­ondary search for fea­tures they want from an employ­er – from a dog-friend­ly office to an enhanced parental-leave enti­tle­ment. That sec­ondary search is becom­ing more demand­ing in this mar­ket.”

Flexa prac­tis­es what it preach­es. Employ­ees work four-and-a-half-day weeks, with core hours of 11am to 3pm and an annu­al leave allowance of 36 days. The Lon­don-based firm also allows its staff to work where they like. John­son-Jones her­self recent­ly spent six weeks work­ing in Devon and Corn­wall. 

Hap­py­OrNot is a Finnish-based multi­na­tion­al that asks peo­ple exact­ly that ques­tion on behalf of the com­pa­nies to which it sells its dis­tinc­tive ter­mi­nals. These con­sist of four coloured but­tons that cus­tomers can press to indi­cate whether they are very hap­py, hap­py, unhap­py or very unhap­py with the ser­vice they’ve received. It has also con­duct­ed a large-scale research employ­ee sat­is­fac­tion sur­vey, polling 2.8 mil­lion peo­ple across a range of indus­tries last year. The results sug­gest that flex­i­ble work is hap­py work. 

Respon­dents in indus­tries offer­ing more flex­i­bil­i­ty – tech­nol­o­gy, for instance – were sig­nif­i­cant­ly more like­ly to declare them­selves very hap­py than those in sec­tors such as health­care, which tend to require employ­ees to be on the premis­es at all times while on duty. 

With 83.5% of tech work­ers say­ing that they were very hap­py over­all, it’s notable that they main­tained this lev­el of sat­is­fac­tion at all times of the day and week. Those who worked Sun­day shifts in less flex­i­ble sec­tors became far less con­tent. For instance, the pro­por­tion of health­care staff say­ing they were very hap­py work­ing on that day was 51.9%, com­pared with their over­all aver­age of 63.5%.

The Covid-enforced move to remote work­ing has not only giv­en peo­ple a taste for a dif­fer­ent way of oper­at­ing; it’s also detached them from the hive mind of the office. That’s the view of Eric Mosley, co-founder and CEO of Workhu­man, a provider of employ­ee recog­ni­tion schemes. 

“We’re see­ing a huge amount of dis­con­nec­tion between employ­ees, their com­pa­ny and their col­leagues,” he says. 

This indi­cates that many peo­ple are “look­ing for jobs with mean­ing and for employ­ers that accom­mo­date dif­fer­ent work­ing pref­er­ences, all the while main­tain­ing a sense of human com­mu­ni­ty. If that’s not the case, they will walk. Workhuman’s lat­est research report, Two Years into Covid, reveals that the great res­ig­na­tion is still a mas­sive dis­rup­tor. Of the work­ers we sur­veyed across the UK, the US, Cana­da and Ire­land, four in 10 are plan­ning to look for a new job in the next 12 months.”

The study also found that peo­ple who had sim­ply been thanked by their man­ag­er for their efforts in the pre­vi­ous month were half as like­ly to be seek­ing a new job than those who hadn’t.

“At a time when peo­ple are quit­ting their jobs in unprece­dent­ed num­bers, ‘thank you’ has nev­er been so pow­er­ful,” Mose­ly says.

Marks observes that most boss­es are what the Char­tered Man­age­ment Insti­tute calls “acci­den­tal man­agers”, by which it means they’ve been pro­mot­ed for their tech­ni­cal knowl­edge and/or length of ser­vice, rather than their peo­ple skills. A lack of know-how in this area can be prob­lem­at­ic when it comes to moti­vat­ing their team mem­bers and mak­ing them feel engaged with their organ­i­sa­tion. 

He believes that all line man­agers should hold review meet­ings with their staff at the end of each week “where they ask: ‘What went well for you? What didn’t?’ Too often, we sim­ply move on to the next thing. Busi­ness­es are con­cerned that they would be open­ing Pandora’s box by doing that – they wor­ry about what would come out. But they don’t see that so much good stuff can come out sim­ply by ask­ing.”

One com­pa­ny that has opened the box is Fish­brain. Its pop­u­lar app helps anglers to locate the best swims, exchange tips and find fish­ing pals. But what it couldn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly do was help the com­pa­ny lure more female tal­ent to its 130-strong work­force – a chal­leng­ing task, giv­en that both cod­ing and angling are male-dom­i­nat­ed pur­suits. 

Fish­brain signed up to Pink Pro­gram­ming, a not-for-prof­it organ­i­sa­tion that runs cod­ing events for women and cel­e­brates female suc­cess­es in the tech indus­try, to see if it could help to devel­op and attract female coders. 

Anoth­er key move it made was sim­ply ask its employ­ees for ideas to make the work­place more inclu­sive to women. 

Lisa Ken­nel­ly, Fishbrain’s chief mar­ket­ing offi­cer, explains: “If we can’t make women feel wel­come in the office, how can we make them feel wel­come in our app? One thing that kept com­ing back from staff was that they would like the bath­rooms in the build­ing to offer free san­i­tary prod­ucts. Mak­ing this small change has made a big impact. Our female join­ers always com­ment on how val­ued this makes them feel com­pared with pre­vi­ous work­places.”

Fish­brain now also sup­ports flex­i­ble sched­ules for employ­ees who need to work out­side typ­i­cal office hours. Such minor con­ces­sions can make all the dif­fer­ence in retain­ing the ser­vices of val­ued employ­ees. 

John­son-Jones believes that a pos­i­tive change is com­ing at even the biggest cor­po­ra­tions. “It is absolute­ly pos­si­ble for office-based com­pa­nies, even those with thou­sands of employ­ees, to at least offer hybrid work­ing. Any firm say­ing that it isn’t is lying.”

Not that her old employ­er has start­ed offer­ing flex­i­ble work­ing, she notes. Such firms may be able to offer the most gen­er­ous finan­cial rewards, but they have yet to realise that, for the lat­est gen­er­a­tion of can­di­dates espe­cial­ly, it’s not all about the mon­ey.