New ways of working
Growing our own talent
In 2024, with the aim of enhancing our attraction channels, we launched an early talent and experienced hires campaign on our social media channels focused on our values and behaviours, and also launched our TikTok account. Both initiatives aim to attract the best talent in the market that share our values and best placed to serve our clients.
In May, we launched our new Employee Value Proposition to reinforce our employee branding messaging in the market, including updates to our website and a recruitment brochure to highlight our offer to prospective candidates.
Social mobility continues to underpin our DEI strategy, and our Career Start Talent Programme provides training, support, and guidance to Year 12 students from underrepresented backgrounds over a five-year period. As part of our commitment to increasing social mobility and breaking down barriers to the profession, we are no longer offering ad hoc or informal work experience.
Global mobility is a core part of our overarching strategy, and we are collaborating with experts to ensure that best practices inform our offering. Our initiatives in this area are focused on growing our own talent and, crucially, ensuring we have the flexibility to move that talent across borders to enable our people to achieve their full potential. We continue to run our international secondment scheme for trainees in our offices in Hong Kong, Dubai, Paris, Zurich, Geneva and Luxembourg.
Our traditional and reverse mentoring schemes are gathering pace, and we also offer our core learning and development programmes through the CRS Business School. For the first time in 2024, we offered these face-to-face to our teams in Dubai, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
We continue to provide one-to-one coaching and team coaching across our Firm to support team performance, and in the past 12 months, we expanded this offering to our partners in Hong Kong.
In 2024, we launched our HeadStart programme in partnership with Aspiring Solicitors. This partnership programme helps prepare placement scheme candidates to understand the expectations of our scheme and supports them to put their best foot forward.
Developing leaders for the future
During 2024 we carried out a strategic review and training needs analysis of our CRS Business School programme among our trainees, newly qualified lawyers, knowledge development teams, early careers professionals, existing trainee supervisors and business services managers in order to support our early talent to develop. This comes as the legal industry navigates changes related to the Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE).
We also reviewed our approach to developing leaders for the future, and through comprehensive focus group work, identified core competencies that will form the basis of ongoing development programmes for our Business School. As part of this work, we have started to identify and support succession planning through the provision of leadership development opportunities.
We are taking a scientific and structured approach to identifying future talent capability against core competencies and building structured programmes to develop those individuals and build our talent pipeline.”
Supporting our people
Providing our people with the right platforms and forums to share their views and what they value is crucial to fostering an inclusive working environment.
Employee voice is important to us, it helps to inform our policies and direction , we invite feedback from our people via several different avenues.
We are supplementing our well established joiner and leaver surveys and providing opportunities for listening posts and further external surveys on the areas of wellbeing, diversity, equity and inclusion to ensure we are making informed decisions on our support in these areas.
We are also developing learning sessions across our Firm to support and encourage our people to challenge and ‘call in’ behaviours. These aim to equip us all with the necessary tools and skills to help build a culture where we all feel safe and supported to speak up.
As part of the Worker Protection Act 2023, we have partnered with a trusted external third party, to supplement our ‘speak up’ culture through the introduction of an anonymous reporting tool which colleagues can use to voice concerns confidentially concerning behaviour. These valuable insights into our workplace dynamics will enable us to take proactive steps to prevent and tackle inappropriate behaviour, including harassment and discrimination.
Over time, we will build up data-driven insights so we can truly understand the micro behaviours that build up and influence culture. With earlier visibility of issues, we can take pre-emptive action to address problems before they escalate and address any patterns in our workplace culture.’’
We are continually working to improve the policies and provisions that we offer our people, and in May 2024, we partnered with a new global benefits provider to streamline and strengthen the benefits and rewards available to our international offices.
In the UK, we extended our family friendly and reproductive health offerings. Our pay and leave entitlements have been significantly enhanced and provide for a more inclusive parental leave approach. We also introduced several new family forming and reproductive health policies as part of our overall wellbeing approach.
As part of our broader commitment to family-friendly initiatives, we expanded our family-friendly coaching. Previously this focused on senior Partners and managers in our UK offices, providing support to individuals as they navigated a period of time away from the business or made the transition back to work. We have now rolled this out more widely across our Firm through group coaching sessions and hope to expand support to our other international offices.
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