Culture is becoming more and more important in businesses. The health and wellbeing of colleagues is rightly at the core of any sensible strategy and is only going to become more and more important.
CFG Life has been a key focus for our business for some time now. Our business is driven first and foremost by our purpose, which is helping those affected by injury – together. This is underpinned by our SPIRIT values – Support, Passionate, Innovation, Respect, Integrity and Teamwork.
We place huge emphasis on this at CFG Law and that’s why we were so delighted to be told that we have been awarded the Gold Standard by the hugely respected organisation, Investors in People.
Even better, we also received their new Health and Wellbeing accreditation, reflecting our focus on making sure our colleagues have a good work-life balance and understand what we are trying to achieve and their role in helping us to be a successful business.
Why it matters to us
Receiving the Gold Standard accreditation places CFG in the top 18% of companies in the world who have completed the Investors in People process. However, the accolade is the result of the work our entire team has done in recent years to make CFG a place where we could, to pinch a phrase from Investors in People, we can #makeworkbetter.
For us, it’s all about the service we provide to our clients and their families – our Client First Service. We believe our focus on those around the injured person as well as the injured individual themselves and our proactive management of cases to ensure the best possible outcome for people without unnecessary delay makes us very different in a legal sector where most firms are similar.
We’ve engaged our people throughout this in shaping the way we operate and the service we provide – and we’ll carry on doing so.
Our ambition is to achieve Investor in People’s Platinum Standard – the highest standard possible, one above the Gold Standard we already have. But we won’t focus on the outcome, we’ll focus on getting it right, listening to our colleagues and improving CFG Life still further. If we do that, the platinum accreditation will follow anyway.
A national digital business
One of the other great things about achieving the Gold standard was that we managed to complete the process while working remotely during the Covid-19 currently engulfing the UK.
A key part of CFG Life has always been the ability to work on an agile basis. It’s what our colleagues need, enabling them to be flexible and balance work and home life, and it’s what our clients need. We’ve been a 24/7 world for some time but many parts of the legal sector still haven’t caught up.
We invested in our business consistently over the past three years to build the platform for our team to work digitally, wherever they are. We operate as a national digital business, able to help injured people and their families wherever they are in the UK, when they need us.
Covid-19 is a challenge for us all personally but for us as a business, we went digital a week before lockdown was announced – with every one of our team able to work from home. We settled our first case working digitally the very next day and have carried on progressing our clients’ cases since. Completing the Investors in People process successfully was just an extension of that.
So what next?
It’s been a fantastic 12 months for CFG Law. We were named the PI Team of the Year for the second year running at the Manchester Legal Awards win in 2019 and 2020.
We were also named as the winner of the Law Society’s Legal Excellence Award for Client Service Excellence in October. And we were also awarded the Spinal Injuries Association’s Torch Trophy for its work with the charity last July.
We’ve recruited more than 30 people in the past 12 months to meet increases in new business, and we opened our second office in Spring Gardens in Manchester city centre.
And then we got these comments from the Investors in People assessors:
“There is clear and effective leadership in place in CFG Law. The values are clearly understood by all managers and staff who know how to interpret these into the desired behaviours.
“The values are aligned with organisational purpose and vision and are embedded or currently being embedded into ‘people’ approaches and processes e.g., recruitment; induction; learning and development; leadership development; performance management; continuous improvement and recognition mechanisms.
“As a consequence of organisational design and the clear positioning of leadership and the values people are able to describe how they feel engaged, empowered, valued and appreciated not only for their skills but for the active contribution they make to the success of the business (through delivering a Client First Service)".
But it’s important to keep improving. So we’ll be forming a working group internally – it’ll have to meet remotely for now! – to look at the feedback from Investors in People and see where we can improve further.
Our colleagues will have a key role in that. CFG Life is for them. And, as culture continues to increase in importance for businesses, our Gold Standard CFG Life will become even more important too.
Richard Clark
