Skip to main content

Guide to being a nice boss at Xmas

20.12.06 how to be a nice boss towards your solicitors, fellow partners, legal executives, paralegals, secretaries and office cleaners at Christmas
1. Don't throw things at your staff. Particularly the Law Society Conveyancing Handbook - it hurts!
2. Don't get drunk at the Christmas party - this always leads to consequences remembered for decades afterwards. Whether this involves rambling incoherently about how useless one of your staff is, or some minor act of vandalism, your colleagues will remember you for it the following day even if you forget.
3. Give out Christmas cards - sign them neatly and legibly, so that your colleagues know who are you when they put it up at home. Do not scrawl your usual signature straight across the greeting.
4. Firing staff on Christmas Eve could lead to your car windows being put in, and your car tires let down. Your workforce would probably symphathise...
5. Having a Christmas party is always a good thing, even if they are usually tedious affairs for some. It gives you a chance to talk to your colleagues outside of work, and have chats about other things than clients (although they inevitably lead back to work eventually!).
6. Buying your staff presents is always nice, and should be encouraged. However presents such as law textbooks, a DIY Willpack or a p45 already filled out are probably not appropriate...
7. Offering to close the office early on Christmas Eve (it is a Sunday after all!) is a nice gesture, and will probably result in more work being done in the morning before closure than if you keep it open all day!
8. Consider offering to do some cleaning in the office or more manual work (perhaps photocopying?) on Christmas Eve as a sign of goodwill to all men and women. It will give some of your staff a chance to talk to you for a change.
9. Offer large pay rises, and invite yourself round to a member of staff's house to Christmas Day armed with a goose and a box of chocolates! They would be overjoyed to see you.
10. Complain all the way up to Christmas about how you have to close down over the Christmas period and the extortionate cost of the Christmas meal (which you leave early in any event), keep the office open until 5.30pm on Christmas Eve and make all the staff stay until then, fire a secretary on Christmas Eve just for entertainment and pass a rumour around the office that redundancies are on the cards for all fee earners. Bah humbug!

www.ten-percent.co.uk - Legal Recruitment Consultants on the web

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Overpaid Charity CEOs - top 40 of high paid employees - updated 2022

In 2014, we wrote an article about high pay in the charity sector after the Charity Commission started to require all charities to disclose pay of senior executives earning more than £60,000.    We have updated the list for 2022, with a comparison chart so you can see the difference between 2014 and 2022. We have included the source of the most recent salary levels and the year refers to the accounts year we extracted the salary information from.   2022 Top 40 Chart of High Paying Charities Charity Highest salary Year Consumers’ Association £390k-£400k 2020 MSI Reproductive Choices £240k-£250k 2020 Save the Children International £285k-£300k 2020 Cancer Research UK £240k-£250k 2020 The British Red Cross Society £170k-£180k 2020 Age UK £180k-£190k 2020

Is it possible to work as a Paralegal when you are a Qualified Solicitor

  This question comes up all the time and is quite a common query that we imagine the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) are getting better at answering due to the sheer number of people asking the question. Many years ago the advice seemed a bit varied at times, but we have recently had a candidate who wanted to work in a locum role in the short term and waiting to go back on the Roll and get a practising certificate after some time spent outside the profession. She has been given fairly concise advice on whether she could work as a paralegal whilst waiting to be readmitted which we are repeating here. This article is written as a discussion point and is not intended to be advice in any shape or form. For full advice on your particular set of circumstances please speak to the SRA (or whoever else you like, but please do not depend on the information in this article!). The SRA have a simple online test to determine if you need a practising certificate and this i

What questions are asked in an Investors in People Assessment?

Recently Ten Percent Legal Recruitment was assessed for the investor in people accreditation. We worked very hard on this and spent some time as a company ensuring that all our procedures and policies were in place and that our staff were aware of the various requirements of the Investor in People process. We wondered how the assessment would go and also what the questions were likely to be during the interviews. The assessor was very friendly and explained from the outset what she was wanting to do and we were already aware that we would have thirty minute interviews with the directors and managers and twenty minute interviews with the staff. We also had the Investors in People programme so we were able to look and see what the actual questions would be based on, but there was nowhere to indicate what questions would be asked in the investor in people assessments. So if this helps anyone else, here are the questions we were asked in our investors in people accreditation: The assessor