I got an unexpected call from work yesterday (Sunday) which ended up with me doing about an hour and a half’s work. I got phone calls and emails on my BlackBerry, returned a couple of phone calls, went online on my home PC and connected to my work network, realised I needed some specific client software, booted up my work laptop and connected through to work…..
Basically wherever I am (and whenever) I can be contacted and gain connection to work. So this got me thinking on why firms (and law firms in particular) are so tied to working in the office, from Monday to Friday and from 9 to 5 (well that’s the supposed hours for support staff anyway). It makes no sense!
In IT specifically there is such a need to work outside the norm to avoid interrupting the business when doing system maintenance etc, isn’t it time we shifted to shift work or a more flexible working schedule? I’m sure for secretaries and other support staff a wider coverage in hours would be a big bonus for the lawyers.
Work has encroached so much into your private life (and as a consequence private life has encroached on work life, as you now sort out your private life on work time!), isn’t time to accept the fact and allow people to conduct their work whenever and from wherever?
Certainly there are some functions that do need to cover the 9 to 5, but ideally we’d love these to cover 7 to 8 or more. Anyway it’s as simple as managing your staff and ensuring a core set of hours are always covered adequately, isn’t it?
There’s plenty of evidence that suggests flexible/home working :
- reduces sick leave
- reduces commuting time
- saves money for the employer (power saved, overtime saved etc) and the employee (lunchtime sandwiches, coffees, cost of commute etc)
- gets more out of employees for the same time
I’d love to hear if your firm (especially law firms) have a widespread policy for home working or flexible working. Let me know in the comments.
If you’re interested in mobile working, have a look at moof.mobi. It’s a great blog on the subject (although Mr Moof has gone a little quiet of late).
A while ago I worked for a firm that allowed home working, this was definately beneficial as I always got a lot more done at home and I was easily contactable both by phone, I.M and email,
Unfortuantely in my experience I have found that firms (and not just law firms) in the UK generally view home working with suspicion, I think the thought is we’d all sit at home watching T.V and not actually doing our work.
This is of course a flawed argument as if you are not producing results your boss would soon take you to task.
The pluses of working from home are very clear, but their are negatives also. I know from personal experience I would often work long into the night (post midnight in some cases) on things that could easily be left until the next day or re-sheduled entirely !!
Traditional companies such as Law firms, Banks, Insurance companies, have very definate corporate cultures which are against this sort of home working.
A lot of the time you will find those companies say this is to ensure you are available in the office when you are needed and it promotes a more cohesive team unit, but in reality I suspect they just don’t like the idea of people working in their houses.
I.T is one of those jobs that can really be done from any location on the globe, It just needs a bit more thinking and architecture around the workers to support it. what we do is definately not a 9-5 job and it requires a modicum of common sense on the workers part to know when to work from home and when not to.
It is that common sense a lot of companies don’t seem to want to beleive their workers have.
Before my firm Heller Ehrman based in San Francisco imploded last Fall, I had been telecommuting from my home in Chicago – about 2000 miles away. I worked in the IT department and was responsible for project management, application development (Microsoft Office) and bringing the department and the firm into the Sharepoint world.
In my section – the Application Services department – we had 9 people almost all of whom telecommuted full or part time. My boss lived in New York, we had many working from home in San Francisco area and one in Mexico.
I think it can work if the team dynamics are solid and there are no slackers. We were all treated like adults and behaved/performed accordingly. There were great increases in productivity and since we were all on call 24/7 anyway, it was comforting to do so from one’s home.
I think big law firms are going to have to embrace telecommuting and lower their real estate costs. They will need to follow the Accenture model of having home-based workers who, when they need to collaborate in person, “check in” at the office for the day using conference and support services as needed.
I work in an IT department where we have flexible working.
It’s great for morale – for example if people have to work late they’re less likely to resent it as they know they will get the time back another day.
Also unproductive time is reduced e.g. rather than spending the last hour of a Friday clock watching, people can leave early and put that hour in at a more productive time.
Finally some people like to get in early and some people get in late.
This means there’s usually a fair few people around between 8am and 6pm so you actually get more cover.
I work at a law firm that has split the secretarial role into a PA role (for senior lawyers only; shared apart from the MP), which is traditional hours and a document production role (almost an old-style typing pool, except they’re word-processing specialists with deep knowledge of MS Word so they can deal with the nightmare that is multi-level numbering with automated tables of contents) which is hugely flexible.
Because the DP staff are interchangeable, flexible working is easy, and that team now has less than 8% working 9-5 * 5, and, combined, they cover 6 am to 10 pm (for creating and amending documents and dealing with any kind of digital dictation job).
We’ve found that Citrix Application Gateway is invaluable for enabling home working for lawyers and about half now work from home at least one day a week. Having everything in iManage (as we can now call it again!) is great for this as it removes the requirement to take bulky heavy files home.
Of course, IT are the group that don’t do flexible working! We cover 8am to 6pm, on a shift system (if you prefer working early/late then you get your preference as long as there is at least one person there at 8 and one person stays till 6) but you can’t work earlier or later and you can’t work more hours some days and less others.