The future for law firms lies in building a high-value, highly skilled organization that recognizes the value of skills and knowledge and treats staff as a valuable asset.
Recruitment and retention of valued staff require that the law firm provide and improve work-lifestyle benefits and services, leave benefits, supportive work environments, and alternative work arrangements and schedules.
Law firms must now accept alternatives to the 60-hour work week, rigid schedules and location constraints.
Status quo
Linda Duxbury's study Work-Life Balance in Canada, Making the Case for Change sets out the situation in Canada today and makes the full case that requires businesses to alter their expectations, work time and place requirements and benefits to meet the needs of all Canadians. Making the necessary changes will benefit the employee, the family, the employer and the employee's colleagues.
Most North American firms expect a full-time attorney to bill between 1,800 and 2,000 hours to clients in a year. A part-timer might be expected to bill between 1,100 and 1,200 hours. In Canadian firms, especially smaller firms, the billable hour goals may be lower.
When workers were asked about their ideal amount of time at work, in a 1997 survey of workers conducted by the US Families and Work Institute, 60 per cent of both men and women responded that they would like to work less while only 19 percent of men and women said that they would like to work more. Most workers aspire to work between 30 and 40 hours per week.
Meanwhile 22 per cent of Canadians work more than 41 hours per week. When we take into account overtime, travel time and work taken home, the majority (54 per cent) of Canadians devote more than 45 hours a week to paid employment. For a dual-earner family, the two work schedules and the at-home family duties equal 120 hours per week.
"Part-time" in Law Firms
In law firms, the traditional concept of part time as some 20 hours a week doesn't apply. Part time could simply refer to an expectation of 30 to 35 hours a week to make the billable hour quotient of 24 hours per week. For comparison, in 2000 the average American woman worked only 37 hours a week and the average dual-earner family put in a total of 82 hours.
According to an international comparison made by NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute, for men in the United States and Denmark, the ratio of time spent at work to time spent at home helping out with house chores and child-rearing is 3 to 1.
The American law firm Reed Smith has 1,000 attorneys in 18 offices with only 48 part-time attorneys. Only three of those are equity partners. The rest include associates; non-equity partners; and "of counsel" who have a base salary that isn't tied to the firm's profits but who participate in a profit-sharing bonus plan.
Gender-biased Schedules
The number of combined work hours for dual-earner families declines as the number of children under the age of 18 increases. "However, it is mothers, not fathers, who are cutting back," said the researchers, Sociologists Kathleen Gerson, New York University, and Jerry Jacobs, University of Pennsylvania. "Fathers actually work more hours when they have children at home, and their work hours increase with the number of children."
Duxbury's study chronicles how mothers experience higher work overload, role overload, and stress.
Gerson and Jacobs, authors of The Time Divide: Work, Family, and Gender Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2004), suggest "[Accommodation of working mother's needs] includes revising regulations on hours of work and providing benefit protections to more workers, moving toward the norm of a shorter work week, creating more family-supportive workplaces that offer both job flexibility and protections for employed parents, and developing a wider array of high quality, affordable child care options."
What is "Flexible"?
There is no one-size-fits-all solution to providing alternative work arrangements. An employer is well-advised to have a professional-quality survey of staff conducted to learn what particular changes would benefit its employees and are feasible in the organization. Basically, the employer needs to be open to changes in work schedules and work location.
Alternative work arrangements include
- Telework, telecommuting and flexplace: working from home or satellite offices during regular business hours
- Schedule modifications: Day to day, Long term, or Temporary
- Flexible start and stop times: core mid-day hours surrounded by flexbands
- Part-time work, voluntary and with full or prorated benefit coverage
- Job sharing with pro-rated salary and full or prorated benefits
- Compressed work week such as four 8 1/2-hour days
In addition,
- Provide a limited number of days paid leave each year for childcare, elder care, or personal problems
- Provide short-term and long-term leaves (paid or unpaid) beyond the statutory provisions for sick leave and vacation:
- Personal leave
- Parental or Family leave
Accommodation for Flextime Lawyers
Firms must create a supportive environment for those who take advantage of alternate work arrangements. Efforts should focus on making people feel valued by the firm and included in its life and culture. To empower lawyers who work a flexible or reduced schedule:
- facilitate networking;
- provide support and career guidance; and,
- effect change thoughtfully.
Managers and partners and any supervisory staff must have the necessary training to be able to cope with the challenges of managing the new workplace. They must not only tolerate but they must practice it or the employees beneath will not believe that the alternatives are truly available without loss of future advancement.
The Business Value of Flexibility
Duxbury's study chronicled the business costs of an inflexible setting in which employees experienced conflict between work and personal obligations. The UT-Houston Work-Life Taskforce looked at benefits of flexibility in a 2001 study. According to Linda Duxbury, they found both qualitative and quantitative benefits.
The quantitative benefits include:
- Employee time savings
- Increased output due to increased focus and motivation
- Increased employee retention
- Increased income
- Decreased expenses
- Decreased health care costs
- Lower levels of stress-related illness
- Reduced absenteeism
The qualitative benefits include:
- Improved employee morale and loyalty
- Enhanced employee recruitment
- Enhanced public and community relations
- Happier, better-served clients