HERBERT SMITH FREEHILLS
BECOMING #FUTUREFIT
Herbert Smith Freehills commenced its #FutureFit program in August 2018, involving employees to ensure HSF is set-up for the future and can continue to evolve, adapt and thrive in a changing world of work.
The program was borne from a recognition that the world is changing, in terms of client’s businesses, technology’s influence over the way people work, and the changing expectations of employees and clients. Starting with an intensive period of crowd sourcing organisational design within the organisation, the program created lots of new ways for people across the business to ideate and design new initiatives.
A wide range of solutions emerged that increase humanity and community within the organisation, and change how the firm engages beyond it.
HSF set out to understand and design its workplace for the future, prioritising three key questions:
What does the value proposition for its people need to be?
What experience will its clients be seeking?
How should they optimise the way they work and create value?
To answer these questions a platform was created that felt owned by people in the business, taking a bottom up rather than top down approach, inviting people in and creating many ways to get involved.
Their approach empowered people, maximising participation and energy to tap into the wisdom of the crowd. Positioning the program within the business rather than within the leadership group, the role of leaders was to hold the space, get oxygen to emerging ideas, get roadblocks out of the way of progress, protect experimentation and potential failure, celebrate contributions and tell the stories of success. Leaders needed to resist the urge to push people from the top to be involved, and hold their nerve through periods of silence.
The result was something that felt disruptive and different – everyone learned a lot about what was important to different people, and commitment was built around the solutions that emerged as people worked on them together.
HSF has implemented many changes and continues to experiment. Some of the changes include:
Establishing a mental health network
Introducing an on-site psychologist
Launching Pathways, a career development initiative which focuses on enabling people to better understand the capabilities they can build at HSF for a range of different career paths both within and outside the firm.
Establishing a reverse mentoring programme, where junior employees are matched with senior leaders to share new perspectives, enrich communication across levels throughout the business and build new skills.
Innovation 10 – a global initiative that provides everyone with 10 days per year to work on innovation projects for the firm.
One particular initiative that has increased humanity within the organisation is Conversations, which seeks to describe the conversations that need to be had to support people to thrive. Through #FutureFit, HSF uncovered that what's important to people is the relationships they form that enable them to develop and perform at their best. The Conversations initiative replaces and goes well beyond the traditional performance review, prioritising relationships – one conversation at a time. The initiative provides a framework, support and practical tools that build capability for having regular, meaningful conversations and sharing strengths-based feedback with a focus on the person in front of you, not just the task at hand.
HSF acknowledges that while it is implementing all these new initiatives, the field of play continues to change. Through the #FutureFit work, new capabilities and methodologies to co-create have been established and there is greater belief that everyone at HSF holds the pen in designing the future.
