You didn't get into business to do the bare minimum. You want to be the best.
Very few companies set a goal to be "acceptable" or "good enough" in their performance or profitability. They want to be great - maybe even the best - and if that's true of their services and products, it has to be true about the workforce. That means hiring good people and enabling them get great results.
Clear Expectations & Communications
“No employer can succeed with muddled messages or uncertain goals. Employees - from the day they are hired until the day they depart - need to know with clarity what their company expects from them, and what they can expect from the company. And they need to hear how they're doing."
Before anyone even starts work, the great employer has given them a contract which spells-out in the plainest possible language, "the deal." With that should come a job description and a copoy of the employer's policies . The candidate should be given time to acquaint herself with it, even to show it to a lawyer if she wishes, to ensure the terms are clear.- before she signs and before she starts.
Rules of the Road
What's in that contract? The basics: hours, pay, duties, benefits and more. It should talk about performance obligations and evaluations. It should talk about what the parties owe each other. If you've hired someone after a real recruitment process, you should have confidence that they will likely succeed and be part of the team for a long time. But you should have equal confidence that one day, they or you, will decide to terminate the connection. That's just reality, so you should accept that and do something productive with it.
Mutual Respect, Mutual Success
“Good enough isn't good enough.”
Many laws touch the employment relationship: employment standards, occupational health and safety, human rights, workers' compensation, and so on. If a company complies with the minimum legal expectations set by regulators, that is a respectable standard.
But if a company exceeds those expectations it sends a message to everyone who works for them: we strive to achieve better than the minimum. Sometimes "good enough" is the best we can do, but it's rarely ever anyone's goal.
How does a law firm help get you to "great"?
What an employer can do - must do, to be great - is equip people to be good at what they do and inspire them to become better. That means the employer has to manage the employment relationship like a client relationship or key project.
Our law firm wants each client organization to be equipped to be great. We want you to have the right, up to date policies and contracts; we want you to have the expert advice you need, when you need it; we want you to feel confident that you are in a strong position whether facing a regulator or a legal action from an employee, ex-employees or a trade union.
We want you to be ready, every day, for what may happen. Because it will happen, whether you're ready or not.