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Values are a set of principles or beliefs that are important to you. Culture is putting those values into play through tangible actions that can be seen and felt.
For instance, one of our values at my law firm, ASA, was promoting a mixture of work and life into one’s lifestyle. During the pandemic when many workers were working from home, this “balance” was knocked on its head, with employees working more than ever! At my firm, I wouldn’t stand for any of it. I wanted to cultivate an environment where empowered employees could embrace the most from both worlds.
Even though there’s no way to 100 percent balance both, I knew I could at least leverage that value to somehow create a culture that alleviated the stress of employees feeling compelled to work the long, hard hours attorneys are notoriously known for. To achieve that, I tackled the main culprit: billable hours. The industry norm is for attorneys to bill anywhere from 2,100 to 2,800 hours a year. That’s a lot of hours! At ASA, I knew it would be counterintuitive to desire a good work-life mix and still have an absurd requirement like that. Because I held true to that value, I lowered our billing requirements. How? Simple. Reduce overhead, get rid of the fat, get lean.
No one cares about your fancy office overlooking the lake and expensive, robot-looking coffee machines! Clients want exceptional service at a reasonable cost. That’s it. We now have one of the lowest billing requirements in the industry. This means lower caseloads for attorneys and more time for family. Sure, I’m giving up revenue in the short term. But in the long term, I’m gaining a kick-ass, productive team with top-notch talent constantly elbowing to get in through our doors.
The employees we currently have are sticking around longer. They’re not burning out or wallowing in misery, and they’re not a pain in the ass to be around. My point: having a relentless commitment to your values makes a difference, even if in the short run you end up losing a bit of money.
Gratitude is another value of ours. To make it part of our culture, we tied an action to it: creating a gratitude box. Of course, after COVID-19, when work became virtual, so did our gratitude box. Now it’s less of a box and more of a channel that’s accessible on mobile devices. Every day, I see a stream of messages filter in on this channel, which is the greatest feeling.
Basically, the gratitude box/channel is a place where staff and attorneys can post thank-you notes for teammates. I could thank my assistant for staying late and getting an item knocked off my to-do list. Or a coworker could thank someone for helping them out with a case. Pre-COVID-19, when we hosted monthly huddles, we’d select a restaurant or someplace fun to unleash the contents of the box. We’d go around the table and have each person pick out a note at random and read it aloud.
Yeah, the gratitude box aligns with our value of gratitude, but it also achieves a couple of other things.
First, it’s rewarding to hear someone say, “Thank you.” Many of the tasks we do day to day are pretty mundane, sometimes tedious, and often thankless. A heartfelt thank you goes a long way.
Second, it makes the person you’re writing the note to appreciate you, building camaraderie between colleagues.
Third, it draws attention for us as an organization to all the incredible ways our staff is going above and beyond on a daily basis — efforts that would otherwise go unseen, unnoticed, and unaccredited. To be able to pause and acknowledge and show appreciation to staff who are going above the call of duty is something we never want to lose as an organization.
Fourth, and most important, it forces you to think that you don’t have it so bad! It is easy to look at an organization and point to numerous things that can be better — better pay, better benefits, less work, etc. Gratitude instantly humbles you and makes you realize just how blessed you really are!
You must be uncompromising with your values, even at times when it seems the most challenging. For instance, the year after the initial COVID-19 outbreak, I was analyzing the firm’s quarter-one financials. As a team, we did not meet our goals. In fact, we were falling severely short revenue-wise. How did we respond? Did we fire attorneys who failed to meet the billable requirement? Did we place employees on furlough to account for the lack of receivables? Nope.
Instead, I met with each employee to discuss their thoughts on our quarter-one team performance and dissected some of the challenges they were facing at work and home. After those meaningful conversations, it was obvious that people were experiencing some serious burnout dealing with work and home. Examining our values of promoting wellness and holistic health, I decided I needed to take action to ensure we were tying them to our culture.
We got to work, reaching out to clients to tell them we’d be available via email but that our office would be closed. Then we surprised our staff with complimentary massages at the local spa so they could kick back and unwind. To make sure they didn’t fret about losing out on pay for the day, we gave them credit for their billing.
By doing this, I was reinforcing the message that our value of promoting holistic health was real. It was so real that we were willing to forgo a day of revenue during a poor fiscal quarter to ensure our employees had a day to decompress. In return, our employees sensed our care and concern for them as people.
Having a law firm do this today may be unheard of, but to me, nothing makes greater sense. Caring for our employees in this way is our culture.
Shuaib Ahmed, a legal defense attorney, is owner and president of ASA Law Group, LLC, and ASA Law Group, Inc. He is the author of the new book, Personal Business: Using the ASA Way to Build an Inspired, Purposeful Team (ForbesBooks, April 11, 2023), offering a tried-and-tested leadership approach that prioritizes the individual worker. Learn more at asalawgroup.net.
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