Background:  An Opportunity to Transform

This Am Law 50 firm headquartered in Los Angeles has over 900 attorneys working from 15 domestic offices.  The shift to hybrid operations was a transformative event for the firm, fundamentally altering the meaning of the office for its professionals.  Over the same period of time, the firm was also pleased to be experiencing unprecedented growth – they had reached annual revenue milestones that placed them into an elite category.

Leadership recognized the nexus of these evolutions as both a mandate and opportunity to innovate the firm’s workplace to meet its new strategic business objectives and maximize its competitiveness as a global elite firm.  As a result, transforming all 15 of the firm’s domestic offices from an ‘office’ into a destination and recruitment tool became a business priority.

While plans to redesign the firm’s offices to bring unique, five-star amenity spaces to each location—from barista bars to social gathering areas — quickly developed, the tandem need to innovate and transform hospitality services to meet the requirements of workplace experience became problematic.  Initially, firm leadership incepted an internal workplace experience task force to innovate hospitality, but internal resources lacked the proper expertise and bandwidth to bring innovation to this key part of the firm’s future strategy.

At the time, the firm worked with two global outsourcing service providers who delivered varying levels onsite hospitality services.  Leadership challenged each current provider with the task of bringing innovative workplace experience solutions that would better align with the firm’s business objective.  However, neither were able to bring innovative solutions, nor could either outfit, source, train or retain staff for any workplace experience-focused solution.  As a result, the firm’s strategic objective of creating workplace experience was languishing with unfilled, open positions lingering well past 90 days.

The firm engaged Forrest Solutions.

 

Forrest Solutions WPX™: Recruit, Invest, Deliver, Repeat

Forrest Solutions is the recognized market leader in delivering outsourced onsite workplace experience for law firms and professional services organizations, trademarked as “WPX™”.  WPX is a uniquely delivered, operationally consistent high engagement, white glove hospitality service that is built and implemented in a continuous innovation loop.

With a highly specialized team of over 50 recruiters and a 10-step, proprietary recruitment process, Forrest Solutions is 2x faster in identifying and placing talent, typically placing the right fit for the right role in less than 19 days where current industry averages are 47 days to fill.  This is a direct result of the company’s WPX recruitment engine which is simply unrivaled, both in terms of size and experience in identifying the right hospitality talent for workplace experience – even in difficult markets such as California.

Key also to Forrest Solutions’ success is the incomparable investments in the company’s development of onsite talent.  100% of Forrest Solutions’ professionals are required to graduate from WPX 1.0 and 2.0 programs and must receive 100% marks on WPX hospitality exams in order to become Forrest Solutions WPX™ Certified.  Another touchpoint of success is the company’s unrivalled, real-time Net-Promoter Score dashboard that provides instant performance insight, ensuring seamless, consistent delivery and improvement of WPX services.

Forrest Solutions offered firm leadership an onsite tour of a comparable Big Four accounting firm workplace experience client, and it was here the firm witnessed another key touchpoint of the Forrest Solutions delivery of WPX:  the WPX playbook.  The WPX playbook masterfully details and operationalizes the delivery of five-star hospitality, ensuring consistency across all of the firm’s locations.

Firm leadership was, in fact, wowed by the level of operational excellence and quickly elected to pilot Forrest Solutions’ WPX offering with a single resource in one location.

Here, where the incumbent providers had delivered traditional receptionist, Forrest Solutions delivered a Lobby Ambassador.  The shift in nomenclature signified the transformative upgrade on traditional office services, while also expanding the role into a concierge-level support professional.  Elevating this role required a WPX-certified professional and graduate of the Forrest Solutions proprietary WPX 1.0 and 2.0 training programs, able to execute on the Forrest Solutions proprietary WPX playbook, ensuring consistency in the delivery of white glove, five-star service.

While the firm’s other two incumbent global outsourcing providers struggled to fill open positions, Forrest Solutions was able to identify, deliver and consistently execute in a difficult market within 18 days.

 

Initial WPX Success Ignites Organic Growth Firmwide

 Word spread quickly. Local leadership throughout the client’s domestic locations were receiving feedback from their local attorneys who visited Forrest-run locations, and began to inquire about open positions. Requests for additional WPX talent grew to include not only Lobby Ambassadors, but an entire array of outsourced positions.

Firm leadership quickly saw Forrest Solutions as a trusted advisor, rapidly expanding and elevating the partnership with the Forrest Solutions team to lead key projects, including standardizing the firm’s office services training firmwide with the Forrest Solutions WPX playbook, ensuring WPX was delivered across all the firm’s locations; advising leadership regarding the firm’s real estate amenities build-outs, reviewing and advising on layouts and designs, even reviewing and selecting details of equipment and coffee vendors for the firm’s newly prized barista bars, and more.

Today, WPX is leading the transformation of the workplace for the firm’s internal and external clients across every hospitality need.  From traditional hospitality, to highly specialized WPX roles, Forrest Solutions has developed a Hospitality Playbook that allows resources to plan events, book restaurants, select caterers and menus, manage events at partners’ homes, and more.

Travel, for example, has been transformed.  When any of the stakeholders in the firm travels to another office, the experience is frictionless and five-star: from arrival emails welcoming the visitor to the office with custom instructions regarding the office location, to details about how the preferences have been confirmed, communicated and ready to enjoy upon arrival – right down to the specifics, for instance, of the preferred beverages and dietary requirements.

The Chief Administrative Officer commended:  “In the last year, Forrest Solutions has been able to outperform their outsourcing peers in several of our challenging markets. Their attention to detail and ability to backfill with mobile support has been noticed by leadership in every office they support.”

 

WPX, Partnership and the Future

The partnership between Forrest Solutions and the firm continues to flourish. The relationship has grown from a single resource pilot program to 15 professionals in six locations. Two of the firm’s offices operated by Forrest Solutions talent have been deemed ‘model offices’ firmwide for the additional locations to follow suit.  Not surprisingly, the firm is targeting an additional 21 professionals delivering WPX Certified services with a National Director as the integrated leader of the Forrest Solutions talent.

 

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