How to improve staff engagement with your firm’s policies and procedures

1. Consider your firm’s culture

Are you promoting an engaged workforce and a positive working environment where staff feel valued and motivated to put their best foot forward? Engaged staff are more likely to take the time to understand the P&Ps that govern their work and to have a clear understanding of what is expected of them. They are also more likely to encourage their colleagues to follow suite and familiarise themselves with the P&Ps relevant to their area of work. 

2. Involve staff in the policy creation and review process

Your staff are a valuable source of insights, perspectives and experiences. Taking an inclusive and collaborative approach fosters a sense of ownership and empowerment which may help to encourage engagement, as well as boosting staff morale. In turn, your policies are likely to be more relevant, practical and aligned to staff’s needs.

Consider arranging focus groups to engage in open discussions and share thoughts, ideas and concerns regarding existing policies and proposed changes and appointing staff in champion roles or establishing committees aligned to specific policy areas to assist with the review process. Ensure that your policy documents reflect what your staff do – as opposed to what the firm thinks they should be doing!

3. Consider the contents

If you need a helping hand on the policy creation and maintenance front, Access Legal’s Policies and Precedents for Law Firms library contains a wide range of template documents covering all of your compliance needs and more, which firms can use as a starting point and adapt to meet their own requirements. The more user-friendly, intuitive to navigate and reflective of what is happening in practice, the better!

4. Ensure you have signposted where to find your P&Ps and they are easy to access

Key updates should be circulated promptly, and staff advised to take note; they need to have the necessary up-to-date guidance at their fingertips.

5. Incorporate the P&Ps into internal training and awareness days initiatives

To promote understanding and to help bring key issues to life. Consider the timing of policy reviews – it may work well to spread the reviews over the year and to combine the release of updated versions with the roll out of relevant legal compliance training, supplemented with internal training sessions e.g. a focus on AML policies and training in March and data protection in June.

Access Legal has a wide range of legal training courses available to law firms which complement our policies and precedents offering.

Celebrating awareness days can be a good opportunity to encourage staff to engage with relevant policies e.g. your Mental health and wellbeing policy during Mental Health Awareness Week and your Equality, Diversity and Inclusion policy during Neurodiversity Celebration Week.

6. Have some fun and make internal training sessions interesting and interactive

Use a variety of training methods such as case studies and quizzes. Take a leaf out of a tax consultant’s book who added a clause into the privacy policy on his organisation’s website to say ‘We will send a bottle of good wine to the first person to read this’ to see if anyone actually read the full terms (It took three months for the wine to be claimed and it was by chance by someone looking at example policies!)

Consider adding a random word into a policy document and offering a prize to the first member of staff who has read the policy and spotted it or creating a knowledge quiz based on the contents of specific policies with prizes for the highest scores. Use your imagination and come up with something which is likely to encourage your staff to learn in an entertaining way – compliance training does not need to be a boring chore! 

We hope these ideas inspire you to get started in improving staff engagement with your P&Ps. If you would like to discuss this further, our Risk and Compliance team are here to help and offer a variety of services including a compliance helpline and a governance review of existing policies.