Listening to associates is necessity, not democracy

“We are not a democracy.” This used to be the stock response of a former colleague of mine whenever it was suggested that staff be consulted on a proposal.

In the business world, law firm partnerships are about as close as you can get to a democracy. This has its obvious drawbacks for those actually trying to get anything done - and in recent years the leading UK firms have devoted a lot of time and energy to trying to get the right balance between executive decision-making and rule by ballot paper.

But don’t confuse this type of democracy with Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer’s recent staging of an associates' away-day.

There has been a lot of talk about the new demands of ‘Generation Y’, generating some interesting comment in the pages of Legal Week by, among others, Tony Angel. It is also true that the prospect of partnership is losing its power as a motivator for young lawyers, who are having increasingly heavy demands placed on them.

And in the current economic environment, there are more escape routes than normal. If you throw in the increasing transparency fuelled by the collaborative powers of the web - like the Legal Week Wiki - then it is not difficult to see why firms are making more effort to work out what makes their associate worker-bees tick.

Obsessing over how to keep assistants happy is not a new phenomenon within the best UK firms. It is just that it is becoming more important for them to get it right. No doubt SJ Berwin’s management thought its new bonus structure would go down well with staff. It didn’t deliberately set out to antagonise many of them.

As long as expectations are suitably managed, Freshfields’ initiative, which was spearheaded by ‘people partner’ Hugh Crisp, represents an imaginative attempt to improve the quality of decision-making within the firm. But it is nothing to do with democracy.