legal sanity

I’m happy to announce that, on Monday, May 14, 2007, I’m hosting Blawg Review #108, a carnival (or roundup) of recent blog commentary on the theme of creating successful business relationships in the law. If you’d like to submit a relevant post from your own or someone else’s blog, feel free to do so by Saturday, May 12th. You’ll find submission guidelines here.

As I’ve previously mentioned, the topic of creating successful business relationships and avoiding unsuccessful ones has become a focal point of my coverage here at legal sanity as well as a mainstay of my learning programs business. The law firm-lawyer connection is one of the key relationships I consider on both fronts. In past posts, I’ve looked at it from the perspective of:

• employee engagement
• lawyer experience management
• creating employee evangelists
• fitness
• mutuality
• law firm leadership/culture change

Offering another point to consider is this Brazen Careerist post on the evolution of employee loyalty. In it, Penelope Trunk notes that the incoming generation of workers has a different notion of loyalty than its predecessors. In this age of job-hopping, loyalty doesn’t mean sticking with one company for your entire work life. It means being “loyal while you are there.”

So, what creates this new brand of loyalty?

For employees, loyalty derives in large part from finding “a place that contributes to your core needs, in a way that gives you the opportunity to express passions in significant ways.” Employers, in turn, attract loyalists by rallying employees around a common mission or by making it easy for them to pursue their individual missions in and outside the workplace. Trunk gives us some good examples of loyalty-generating business initiatives.

Echoing her take on the subject is this post from Cali’s Work + Life “Fit” Blog discussing how companies can better support employees caring for children with special needs. Citing the unique challenges facing these working parents (on a national scale, 1 in 12 employees has a child with special needs), the post lists flexible work options, more comprehensive healthcare, on-site support groups and educational programs among other constructive employer efforts. It’s not hard to envision the kind of loyalty that naturally results when an organization recognizes and positively addresses the needs of a sizeable employee population like this one.