Leveraging culture as a strategic competitive advantage

As chief people officer at Wright Hassall, when joining in 2022, my target was for us to be recognised as a ‘Great Place to Work’. One of our first steps was introducing an employee engagement survey to obtain anonymous feedback from our employees on what we were doing well and where we could improve.

Not only did this provide us with information about how our employees were feeling, it also provided us with information on which teams were performing best so that we could adopt their best practice — and a benchmark against which we could assess our progress.

Key to our improvement was ensuring that we took clear and positive actions from our surveys — whether that was practical steps such as new office furniture, or wider ranging challenges such as creating a three-year training and development plan across the firm. All the business-wide actions were discussed and agreed with our culture committee before being communicated and rolled out to the business, with clear timeframes for implementation and regular updates. As well as business-wide initiatives, results were shared at a team level and local action plans put in place.

Alongside our surveys, we continued to improve our employee benefits offering, introducing bonus schemes alongside new benefits, refreshed our career pathways and introduced employee and leadership competencies outlining what we can all expect from all our colleagues. We also focused on employee wellbeing by raising awareness of mental health in the workplace as well as increasing the number of mental health first aiders across the team.

Not only did these initiatives help us to improve our employee engagement, they naturally helped us to increase employee retention, provided greater and more focused development opportunities, while also reducing the number of absences by supporting our colleagues.

We were pleased with the results of our internal survey, but wanted to benchmark ourselves against external organisations, and we were accredited as a Great Place to Work in November 2024. This is an ‘employer-of-choice’ certification scheme that gives recognition to companies providing a great workplace environment, and is based entirely on anonymous survey feedback from current employees.

This achievement highlights the dedication of all our colleagues — who contribute to making our firm not only a leader in legal services but also a fantastic workplace. It underpins our culture, which is focused on trust, respect and collaboration, and it has also given us some fantastic ideas for areas in which we could improve further, which we will now be taking steps to look into.

As a firm of about 250 employees, it’s important for us to make sure that our culture aligns with our business aims and that it enables us to attract, retain and develop our people. We can’t offer some of the benefits, advantages and salaries that working for a larger firm can provide, so we focus on what we can offer — and what the advantages of working for a mid-sized business like ours can provide.