Developing Culture for Developing Teams

Full Transcript

Note: the following transcript was generated by AI and therefore may contain some errors and omissions.

G’day guys, welcome back to the Coast and Commerce podcast. This is a show where we bring inspiring business leaders from across the Sunshine Coast and beyond so they can share their stories and their knowledge and inspiration for you to help you in your business as well. And one of those leaders we’ve got here today is Lisa Aitken from Aitken Legal. Really great to have you here in the studio here and welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Ben. Thanks for having me. For those that haven’t come across Aitken Legal before across the Sunshine Coast, can you tell us a little bit about…

what you guys do, what area of law you specialise in. Sure. Aitken Legal is a boutique firm and we specialise in employment law. So that’s everything from bringing employees on with employment contracts, handbooks, that sort of thing, right through to handling issues with your employees, policies, litigation around issues that you have with employees, anything that…

you do with employees basically, we help with. But we only represent the employer. So we specialise to that degree as well. We don’t have any work that we do with employees at all. So a really specialist area of law that I think many people in business sometimes don’t think enough about. Would that be right? Very much. I think it’s underestimated the importance of having a great team, a great culture in your workplace and systems to minimise your risks, definitely.

That’s some of the stuff that I want to dive into today and the reason why I’ve invited you to join us on the Coast and Commerce podcast. But before we do, Lisa, I’d love to kind of hear your story. So what got you into law in the first place and why that focus on employment law? Employment law, to be honest, I fell into it. So I got a job at Minter Ellison as a graduate lawyer and at the big firms you sort of rotate through.

three practice areas and I fell into employment law as the first one and I never left. I loved it from the minute I started working in it. There’s just so much variety and it’s continually challenging. It’s amazing what humans can do that you think you’ve heard everything but there’s always something that you haven’t heard yet. So that part of the work is what keeps you engaged and…

and everybody that I work with in my firm are all the same. It’s just the different challenges that you face with employment law and there’s so many different areas to it. It’s not, you know, you’ve got discrimination, you’ve got workplace health and safety, you’re dealing with injured employees. It just constantly keeps you challenged. It’s potentially, just in my opinion, probably one of the most human kind of ways to practise law or areas of law to practise in, isn’t it? Because it’s really dealing directly with humans and their individuality and their quirks and their problems and their…

nuances, right? Yeah, they work nuances. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s, um, it’s, it’s a great area a lot of working. Really interesting. So as you, as you built up your law firm, how many years now have you been? We’ve just ticked over 18 years, which is crazy. Um, so we, um, 18 years ago, I opened up from my home. Um, and now we have offices, um, sunshine coast, Gold Coast and Melbourne. So as you’ve expanded your firm over the 18 years,

You know, what, from your perspective, you know, being in employment law and being in that people side of business professionally, like how have you kind of gone about growing your firm, getting the right people on board? What’s been your kind of driving principle there? I’d have to say culture, Ben. Workplace culture is right at the top of my list. And…

And with that, you have employees that are happy. So it makes for a much nicer workplace for everybody. It’s good for hiring staff, retaining staff. So yeah, definitely put workplace culture at the top of that list. So when you define, like how do you define culture in the workplace? Is it just about, you know, putting on some morning teas and wearing a funny shirt on Fridays? Is that workplace culture? I wish it was that easy. Look, I would say it’s shared values.

shared attitudes at work, having good interactions with your colleagues at work and also with your clients. It’s having trust and really about interacting well and just enjoying being there and enjoying working with the people that you’re working with and respecting them. We have a very open door policy, a very give and take workplace. So if everybody’s contributing then.

you know, we give back as well. And the staff that we’ve got, yeah, they’ve all been there a long time. So we’re very, most of them have been there for a long time, very lucky. Well, that’s a good sign of a good culture, right? Take me back to those earlier days in your business, you know, maybe when you had your first one, two, three staff, you know, how in those early days do you think businesses, you know, can start to build a positive culture or a culture in a business?

to set it up for that longer term? I think making sure that you talk with your staff, you find out what they’re wanting the workplace to be like. Being transparent and leading by example very much as well. I’m big on, you know, work -life balance is a term that’s thrown around so much, but I literally live on a work -life balance scenario. So it’s really important. And when I started the firm, I had three children under…

One just turned six. So having a balance was very important to me and I respect that with my staff as well. Knowing that they’ve got a life outside of work and valuing that is important. And as a leader in business or the owner of the business, do you believe culture is something that comes kind of top down? Like does the leader kind of dictate, it’s not the right word, but control the culture or do you think it’s a collaborative? Like how do you see that differentiation? I think you definitely have to lead by example.

but our workplace is very collaborative. We’re only small, we only have 11 staff, so it’s a small firm, but everybody pitches in and helps, and everybody’s valued at the same level. There’s no egos, and I’m very big on that. When I’m hiring people, I always share that story, that there’s no egos in our workplace. Everybody respects each other, and everybody’s valued to the same degree, and that goes a long way. Yeah. So,

The benefits of culture from a staff perspective is relatively clear. It’s like you enjoy your work, you enjoy showing up to work, you can get your work done in a way that fulfils you, right? But what do you say the benefits are from a business perspective? Because ultimately, we want people to be happy, but you also want to grow a sustainable, successful business, right? So talk to me about that. Well, your employees are more engaged. If they like being at work and it’s a great culture there, then they’re going to be far more engaged.

and have job satisfaction. So with that comes better productivity. And I think that gives you an edge from a business perspective. It drives performance. So yeah, I think positive workplace culture is very advantageous for a business. So at Aitken Legal, a lot of what you actually do from a legal perspective is dealing with either mitigating the risks of, you know,

problems happening when employees and employers clash or dealing with the outcomes or the problems that occur when that happens. How do you think culture can actually make that less of an issue? Well, if you’ve got a good workplace culture and your employees are happy, then you have less hassles with them generally. So it reduces the conflict in the workplace considerably. Poor workplace can lead to stress.

it can lead to health problems, mental health problems, it can lead to workers’ compensation claims. Aggrieved employees are not happy. So that all flows down through the charts into it. And especially if you’re a small workplace like ours, it can greatly affect everybody. So yeah, I think that’s where I’d go with that. It’s definitely something that impacts upon your relationships. And if there’s poor relationships and there’s poor engagement and…

poor health, poor mental health in particular at work. Yeah. And, you know, I think that for some businesses, you know, who aren’t, who don’t have the right focus on culture, they can maybe think that just all they need is the right policies in place and, you know, and the right documentation and the right rules and things like that. A lot of what you guys help with. Yeah, we do. We write them all the time, but they’re not worth the paper they’re written on if they’re not acted upon, if they’re not followed. If your employees aren’t trained in relation to them, then…

there’s no point really having them. Yeah, exactly. So I’m guessing here it’s as important to have the right procedures and policies in place and contracts as it is to have the right culture, which actually makes that easy to enforce. Yeah, they flow together, definitely. Yeah. And look, you know, we as a workplace, I’d like to say we have an amazing culture, but it’d be pretty bad if we didn’t, given what we do. So, you know, if we’re…

preaching to people and advising people about how important it is to treat your staff right, to pay your people right, to make sure your workplace is safe, to make sure people are engaged at work. We have to lead by example that way too, given the type of area law that we practise in. So as a legal counsel for employers, what are some of the ways that you support your clients to…

get better culture in their workforce. Is there ways that you guys can help people do that? Sure, look, obviously drafting policies or preparing policies for people is the beginning step. Employers need to work out what their values are right from the beginning. And the best way to do that is to talk to your staff and find out what’s important to them. You know, our values are around integrity, trust, honesty, excellence, balance.

and everybody’s can be different, depends on what type of workplace they want, but that’s definitely the starting point. And then from there, training your employees in relation to those policies is really important. We do all of that as well. But as I said, you can start all that and that can happen at the beginning, but you’ve got to follow it up. You’ve got to regularly visit it and not just put it in the back drawer and say, okay, I did that, now it’s up to everybody else.

As the employer, it’s really important that you keep engaging with your staff as well and talking to them and finding out that they’re happy at work. What’s not working and act upon it. Don’t just go, oh, nothing to do with me. It has, if it’s at work, it’s got a lot to do with you. And when you’re developing those critical documentation within your organisation around employment contracts and policies and procedures and so on, that you guys help people with, how important is it to…

work the culture into those documents. I guess where I’m going with this is like, if you have, you know, culture based initiatives like, you know, birthday day off or, you know, flexible time and things like that, like those are great things to kind of have in place based on the culture that you wanna build in your business. But how does that feed into the actual documentation? I guess it needs to be there. Yeah, definitely. Not all of it. I mean, some of it you just put in place and flow with, but generally,

you build it into your code of conduct. That’s where your values go. It’s where you set your expectations of how you want people to interact, how you want them to work. If you’re offering any flexibilities, it definitely has to form part of it, yeah. But as I said, it’s also very important that, more so important that it’s practised. Yeah. So playing devil’s advocate here, I think that there may be a potential for some culture -based initiatives in a workforce.

to go wrong, right? Particularly, potentially for staff to take the wrong approach or to overextend that expectation and things like that. Have you seen examples of that? Yeah, I have. And I’ve even had it, surprisingly in my own workplace where you just make a wrong decision on a recruitment. I tend to take…

step with an I’m recruiting somebody and interviewing somebody, Chris Campbell, our legal director will usually join in on the interview and he will always take the legal approach and discuss their legal experience, particularly with lawyers, but even with support staff, I’m more interested in their personality and whether that’s going to be a good fit in our workplace. And sometimes you go wrong.

And if you do, it creates a nightmare. It really does create an unhappy workplace if you’ve got somebody who just doesn’t fit. And I don’t know how you put your finger on what that means, but you can just see it straight away and you can sense it in the interactions between your staff. And it can spread, right? It spreads. I refer to it as a cancer. If you’ve got a bad egg in your workplace, it’s just like having a cancer there and you’ve got to move it on. Yeah, you’ve got to identify it first and then move it on. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

And obviously you try to fix it. And if it can’t be fixed, then yeah, you move on. So Aitken Legal at this stage, you said 11 staff, so not a large enterprise organisation at this stage, but you do work with many clients that have hundreds of staff, right? We have clients that have thousands of staff. Thousands of staff, yeah. So it becomes a different question then around culture. So for those people who may be listening that are part of or running a larger organisation with hundreds or even thousands of staff,

How does that culture thing become different? Is it more difficult? Is it? I think it’s more difficult to regulate and to ensure it’s happening.

It’s a matter of you’d have to, you have to have people across the board. So big organisations have departments. Each department needs to have somebody who is responsible for making sure that the culture is good and that the staff, your management basically, have to step up. We’re in a small workplace. It’s usually, you know, the employer will be that person.

large workplaces can do it really well. You know, there’s some great organisations here on the coast that have got large workforces and have an amazing culture. And it’s, and they, you know, in that culture, they also feed in about how important it is for them to give back to their community as well. So they build in, you know, giving back and being involved in charity work and helping other organisations that need help. So I think that goes a long way as well. So.

How intentional do you think people should be about building a culture? If it’s something, someone listening, if they’re like, I don’t know what our culture is like in our organisation. If that’s kind of the feedback that someone’s thinking right now, how can you change that? What do you think people can actually do practically? As I mentioned before, the first step to start is to work out what your values are. And the best thing to do there is to meet with your staff, meet with your team.

have an informal chat with them about what they think their values are, what should be the values in the workplace, what they think is important to them with their workplace. And rolling that out with them and staying on top of it. Yeah. Yeah. And importantly, that’s a collaborative thing, right? It’s very collaborative. It’s not where the business owner just thinks, what should our values be? No. You need to get that from the team. Well, you want their engagement. So, the…

best place to start with is right at the very beginning and have that engagement over the values of the office. And then you know that they want to be part of that. If you enforce it upon them, you’re not going to get that engagement. You make me think about how things change over a business over time because you know, you could when you’re say a smaller business, maybe two, three, four staff, you could have that go through that process of, you know, creating some values or deciding on some values and publishing those and.

you know, codes of conduct and all of that great stuff. But then as you grow, right, that could change. Yeah. Or do you think it’s a matter of just growing with those values in mind and hiring with those values in mind? Or do you think there’s times where you should say, let’s re -evaluate what our values are? Absolutely. Especially if the business grows. Yeah. I would revisit it every few years, probably at the least. We always have a saying that people should review their policies every two years.

And there’s no reason why that shouldn’t be reviewed at the same time as part of that process. And it’s probably not gonna be changed that regularly, but, you know, new people come on board and have new ideas and they’ve always got to be taken into consideration. So yeah, revisit it. Yeah. How have you seen your culture and your values change in Aitken Legal over the years? Because we’re so small, probably not so much. We’ve added…

We have added excellence in there because that’s a really important thing to us to deliver excellence to our clients. So that was something that we all agreed to add in probably in the last couple of years. So yeah, we do review it, but the core ones, they’ve been there from the, you know, pretty much from the beginning, everyone agrees with them. So it’s, yeah, it all goes well. Yeah, so that review process is about looking at what your current values are and thinking, well, are these still our values? Do we still?

you know, with new voices around the table, so to speak. You know, do we still agree with these and do they fit with the culture and the business that we’re building together? You don’t need to throw the old ones out, but maybe you’ll adapt and adjust and add. Yeah, cool. It’s a good reminder to make that part of your business growth planning. It’s very important. Yeah. Excellent. So, you know, thinking just as we wrap up here specifically about Aitken Legal here and, and,

what you guys do, the kinds of work that you do, which we’ve talked about here in this episode, what would you say is at stake for businesses that haven’t got the right, obviously the right culture that we’ve talked about today, but also, you know, having the right documentation, the right contracts, the right procedures, the right policies in place to back that up? Yeah. Well, from a legal perspective, if you don’t have the documentation to back everything up.

and you have a grievance in the workplace, say, and an employee makes a complaint against another employee, you’ll have a lot of difficulty defending that claim where you can’t point to the fact that you’ve got policies to support that there shouldn’t be, for example, workplace bullying and that you’ve trained your employees in relation to what is workplace bullying and what behaviours at work aren’t acceptable. If you don’t have those policies to back that up and that training to show that you’ve done.

then it’s very difficult to defend that claim from an employer’s perspective. Same with discrimination, if you have an, and sexual harassment, all those things at work. If you haven’t educated your staff, got policies around it, it’s very hard for you to sit back and say, well, I’m not liable in any way for this. This is between those two employees. So I’d say it’s true to say that you could have a culture of document on the wall or whatever saying these are our values of, you know,

equal opportunity and respect for all and you can have all these nice words, right? But that doesn’t really hold legal value. As I said before, if you’ve got the policies and you don’t act on them, you don’t enforce them, you don’t train your staff in them, they’re not worth the paper they’re written on. And as an employee, you’re vicariously liable for your employees actions. So it’s really important that you make sure that those actions are in line with those policies and procedures all the time. Excellent. Cool. So I guess the key takeaway for people listening or watching is,

Yes, build a culture, focus on a positive company culture, countless benefits in doing so, but back that up with the right documentation. Absolutely, the right documentation, the right training. Yeah. And the right management team to enforce it. And if anyone listening or watching feels that maybe they’ve got some gaps in that, particularly with documentation and training, that’s what you guys do, right? That’s what we do. So what’s the best place for people if they feel like maybe you need to get something looked at or get some new documentation, policies, procedures, contracts in place?

Where should they go? They should come to us, of course. Yes, so we’re based in Botinia on the Sunshine Coast. And yeah, look us up online, aitkenlegal.com.au and give us a call. You can also join our database, which we put an e-newsletter out each month on a topical issue. We provide free webinars that you can find out about through being on the database and lots of other training we offer as well. So it’s definitely a helpful place to…

to log into, yeah. Excellent. And lots of great video content on your website too. Lots of great video content, yes, on our website. Excellent. So, Aitkenlegal.com.au is the place to go and check them out. And just to clarify, you’re on the Sunshine Coast, but you work with businesses. Oh, everywhere. Around Australia. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, exactly. Well, Lisa Aitken, thanks for joining me on the show. This has been super interesting and valuable. Hopefully those listening are starting to think about their culture in their workplace and maybe what could be done better or if you’re doing things well.

How can you make sure that you’re protected as well through that? Those areas of law that that Aitken Legal can help with. So that’s it for this episode of the podcast. Stick around because and hit subscribe if you’re watching on YouTube or follow if you’re listening on your podcast player because we’ve got more episodes coming in season two of the Coast and Commerce podcast. But for now, thanks Lisa for joining me. Thanks Ben.