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the quarterly magazine of ILTA 11 Peer to Peer strategic objectives for their management, which then allow employees to set goals based on their managers' goals. TRANSPARENCY BREEDS TRUST But performance review is not the only process to rethink in this economic downturn. According to the survey's findings, in order to keep employees motivated and productive, they need to see an open, transparent path for career development and promotions. "Employees consistently cite career development opportunities as a major driver of engagement," he says, adding that most development happens on-the-job. "Together, this suggests that companies which create strong, open internal job markets and a developmental culture are likely to find that employees are more positive about performance appraisal." Most professional services employees find promotion and career development to be fair and satisfactory, with 61 percent reporting a belief in a fair promotion system, 69 percent saying they are satisfied with company training and development and 66 percent stating that they are happy with career development opportunities. Each of these measures is on par with the all-employee benchmark. Charlie Keeling, an HR director at Field Fisher Waterhouse LLP, cites consistency issues with advancement at professional services firms, but says that generally career development is well supported. "Advancement is fairly fast, and expected, in a sector where people are much focused on developing themselves." However, he notes that despite generally good numbers, that professional services firms face a challenge in this area, partially thanks to employees who are bright, competent and have high expectations. "My own feeling," he says, "is that the higher performing professional firms will be those with regular, informal feedback processes." Overall, ETS found that higher-rated companies benefit from online resources that allow employees to see open positions and managers to search posted resumes. Because the issue of promotion and development can be a touchy one, transparency and trust is paramount. Mahoney-Phillips of UBS recommends that companies "think as much about process transparency and communication as they do about the performance review itself." SMILES AND THE BOTTOM LINE While the professional services sector has some boast-worthy numbers in this survey, paying attention to the ones that lag will result in the largest benefit. And again, as firms work to eke out whatever gains they can while keeping spending to a minimum, it's these oft-overlooked human resource management arenas that promise the biggest payoff. Anything that increases employee engagement, buy-in and satisfaction — especially if it is only a matter of reworking existing systems and processes — has the greatest potential for return on investment. After all, what is a company but a collection of individuals? As this study suggests, the happier employees are, the happier the company will be when looking at its bottom line. ILTA 2009 SharePoint for Legal Symposium June 1 7- 1 8, 2 009 | D ow ner s G rove , IL ILTA's Microsoft Peer Group invites you to a two-day event all about SharePoint for Legal! All of the sessions are being planned by your peers, designed to include audience participation and plenty of time for networking. Day One will kick off with a discussion on the future of SharePoint and Office platform, and then we will split the sessions into twotracks. Topics include integrating SharePoint with other products; building intranets, extranets and workflows; best practices; developing applications for SharePoint; governance and security; and searching. Day Two will include a discussion on the future of document/content management, a session on social computing and case studies showing innovative ways firms are using SharePoint. We will wrap up the event with a roundtable discussion forum. register now at iltanet.org