Over the past year, Sparke Helmore Lawyers has established a fair and consistent approach to remuneration across all offices and practices nationally. Remuneration recommendations were passed through multiple stages of review to ensure consistency and fairness i.e. it involved HR, practice leaders, executive committee and the board. The executive committee and board also underwent ‘Inclusive Leadership–Managing Bias’ training, which meant they questioned critical decisions in remuneration meetings.
Sparke Helmore’s D&I strategy has five priority areas: gender; flexibility; AccessAbility; LGBTIQ+; culture and identity, each with specific objectives, measures and outcomes. The strategy is owned by the board and overseen by a D&I committee. It attained WGEA Employer of Choice citation for the first time; the firm’s NMP became a WGEA Pay Equity Ambassador; and it partnered with the government’s JobAccess initiative to identify opportunities to improve recruitment and accessibility for people with disability.
The firm’s resilience program is open to all its people and is designed to help them develop resilience and create sustainable productive working practices that enable them to perform optimally and stay well. Over the past year, Sparke Helmore has increased the training. Example: This year, it introduced a program that specifically targeted the risk of vicarious trauma that can result from the legal work that its teams carry out.
