Creating a solid foundation and nurturing key internal elements are essential strategies in driving the growth and success of your business.
Whether it’s employee evaluations, positive support for your team, or performance reviews, motivating, retaining, and rewarding employees are important elements in building a strong law firm culture.

Research from Gallup indicates that employees who receive weekly feedback from managers (as opposed to annual feedback) are “5.2x more likely to strongly agree that they receive meaningful feedback, 3.2x more likely to strongly agree they are motivated to do outstanding work, [and] 2.7x more likely to be engaged at work.” The benefits of regular feedback may provide more incentive for employees to engage in the performance review process.

Employee Evaluations: Employee evaluations are structured assessments, conducted by employers, to assess an employee’s job performance, accomplishments, strengths, improvements, and contributions to the organization.

Evaluations are individual, formal meetings, where performance is assessed and documented. Evaluations are given to help your team grow, develop, and focus, and can lead to an increase in job satisfaction. They serve as a valuable tool for employee development, feedback, individual performance and goals.

Support For Your Team: Supporting your team is the ability to create an environment where your team members feel safe, valued, motivated, and empowered.

Current trends in the marketplace impact employee satisfaction. These trends include:

• Flexible and remote work opportunities
• Benefits that focus on physical, mental, and emotional health
• Employee wellness
• Promoting a better work-life balance

Encourage team members to take vacations, enjoy time with loved ones, and engage in self care on a regular basis.

Another way you can support your team members is through recognition. Recognition can be shown publicly, through rewards or a raise, or something as simple as a “thank you”. The outward display of recognition is known to boost motivation, improve job satisfaction, and it sets the tone for the culture of your law practice.

Performance Reviews: Although similar to employee evaluations, performance reviews are solely focused on the measured efforts of an employee’s work output, typically focusing on job performance and accomplishments.

For example, “Did the team member meet their goal from last quarter?”

This type of review can be used to determine if a raise will be given or not. This review takes into account the company’s growth, the team members growth, compensation, and salary.

“I think you have to really explain the reason why you’re doing the reviews, whether they’re for salary purposes, mentorship, performance warnings, etc. I think if you put it in terms of financials, that makes people more receptive.”

With the right strategy and tools, performance reviews can become extremely valuable in your law practice. By tying together the company’s values and goals, as well as the goals of the individual, this establishes a solid foundation and offers a transparent and fair approach to evaluate the employee.

• Author Details

Abbie Guerrero

Abbie Guerrero

Assistant Marketing Manager/Resource Advisor

Abbie joined the Atticus team in 2021 with more than a decade of digital marketing experience. She is results driven and has an extensive background in content creation, lead generation, understanding the customer development process, solving problems, and advertising. She is an expert at building relationships and sets high quality expectations. She loves to set and exceed personal and professional goals.

Abbie is currently the Resource Advisor for Atticus livestream webinars and workshops. In addition to her Resource Advisor role, she is the Assistant Marketing Manager. In this role she leads the strategy for digital marketing, creates content for weekly newsletters, all advertising campaigns and executes many ad hoc marketing projects.

Abbie has her bachelor’s degree in Marketing from Utah Valley University. She is a blogger and published author and enjoys spending time with her family in both Utah and California.