By Natalie Myers,
PBN Staff Writer
Making sure employees feel respected and happy in the workplace is a responsibility Nixon Peabody LLC takes “very seriously,” according to Stephen Zubiago, managing partner of the firm’s Providence office.
One of the ways the law firm measures employee satisfaction is through an annual anonymous survey of each employee in each of the firm’s 16 offices across the country.
Each year, Zubiago and others managing the office evaluate the results of the survey.
“We take into account [employees’] concerns and try to rectify them,” he said. “We try to implement a plan to resolve them.”
But not every concern can be resolved. When that happens, Zubiago explains to the staff and attorneys why it can’t.
For example, the cost of parking in downtown Providence is a concern employees have shared in the past, he said. But the problem is hard to rectify because the economic impact of paying for parking would be too great.
“If we can’t solve an issue, at least we’ll go to our work force and explain why,” Zubiago added.
Stacie Collier, partner in the labor and employment group of the Providence office, finds that kind of open communication appealing. She said it creates respect between management, lawyers and staff because it applies to any and all issues that anyone might be having in the office.
The aspect Collier most enjoys about her workplace is the people.
“It’s the people I work with and the clients I work for,” said Collier, who has been working at the office for the past seven years. “The attorneys really try to do the right thing for the staff, for their clients and for each other.”
When Collier last year went on maternity leave, for example, “my colleagues stepped in to help me out,” she said. “I felt my clients were well-serviced.”
In addition, the firm offers more than the federally and state-mandated 13 weeks of maternity/paternity leave to employees who are eligible, said Collier, who took five months of maternity leave. The firm also offers elder care leave for employees who need to care for sick parents and other family members.
“[It] encourages employees to know that work is important, but family comes first,” Collier said.
The firm also has helped employees relocate to other offices when events in their personal lives have created the need to move. The Providence office, for example, had an associate who was getting married and found out he needed to move to California because his fiancée got accepted into graduate school at the University of California Berkeley.
“We said, ‘You don’t have to leave the firm,’ ” Zubiago said. “We made arrangements to make that work … we got him a job at the San Francisco office.”
Keeping employees happy is a philosophy that starts with the head of the firm’s 700 attorneys across the country, and it trickles down. The firm has won Fortune magazine’s Top 100 Best Companies to Work For, two years in a row.
“I get a lot of support from the firm,” Zubiago said, adding that he tells everyone in his office that he has an open-door policy. Employees can come and tell him their concerns no matter what it is regarding.
“[The firm] really tries to accommodate attorneys’ personal needs as well as their business needs,” Collier said.
