Remote control

The IT department at Simmons & Simmons made a discreet joint flexible working application to prove the feasibility of presence technology. Now the move is paying off, says Abby Ewen, the firm’s director of business transformation.

It was an interesting way to start a project but, as they say, necessity is the mother of invention. About 18 months ago we had to relocate the entire IT department, as a matter of urgency, from our usual location on the second floor to a large empty open plan project room a few floors up. What I observed as an immediate result of this was how different people were sitting together in different configurations to the ones that they usually sat in. It entirely changed the dynamics of the department and the interactions between people, and I couldn’t help wondering what the long-term effect of that would be on the way we worked together as a department. An idea was formed to run a ‘smart working’ project in the department and see just how far we could push flexible working and embrace ‘presence technology’.

Following a couple of consultation meetings, where everybody agreed to give it a go, we all collectively completed and signed a flexible working application through HR. This meant that we all had to have our home environments vetted by the Health and Safety ‘police’. We also created a set of ‘ten commandments’ for flexible working, setting out the ‘etiquette’ required. These included always being available at the end of your office extension and being flexible around the days you would work from home so as not to require other parts of the business to rearrange meetings around your presence in the office. Essentially, we initially wanted to run the project with nobody outside the department realising we were doing it. We did not want any allowances to be made, as we thought it was important to prove that it was a viable method of working and that working in this way would not obstruct or delay any of our existing ongoing projects.

We also ensured that everybody had the tools to allow them to work in exactly the same way at home as they would in the office. This consisted of laptops, remote connections into office PCs and across-the-board implementation of Microsoft Office Communication Server (OCS) with headphones and webcams. This latter project meant that ‘presence’ and instant messaging had arrived at Simmons & Simmons.

After a couple of months, when we really felt that we understood the technology, we then chose some lawyers to help us test it from a real end-user perspective. As we like a challenge we started with our International Executive Committee and Board. It was quite slow to gain traction initially, as there were only a limited number of people using it. We now have 1,600 OCS users globally, and are pushing through about 25 hours of voice and video conferences a week, representing 430 actual conferences. Additionally we generate approximately 42,000 instant messages a week. Presence means that we don’t waste time calling people, because we can see at a glance that they are in a meeting, and the integration with Outlook shows when they are due to be out of their meeting without having to search their diary.

It is fair to say that some people have embraced the technology more than others. Some people were slightly suspicious about getting a webcam, and others were concerned about the ‘presence’ element of OCS detailing their availability.

Live Meeting

The IT department now runs all its meetings using ‘Live Meeting’, however, some people from home and some from the office. We share our desktop and collaborate on documents. The novelty of seeing each other on video has, in the main, worn off. However, we do always ensure that when we are conferencing with people in any other office we use video rather than just audio. We are now just in the process of running training and awareness around the use of Live Meeting to a much wider audience of lawyers and secretaries; mainly so that we can reduce our quite high monthly Webex spend. We are also exploring whether people would find value in the recording and distribution of these Live Meeting sessions, as this is also possible. Now that the infrastructure is in, all of this functionality is entirely free. Our professional support lawyers and know-how teams have also worked very closely with us to embrace the technologies. These teams are spread around our international offices, and welcome ways of allowing them to work more as a single team. They are always looking for ways to harness technology in order to provide know-how and training, internally and externally, to support our lawyers and clients alike. They already use a range of audio visual services that enable us to provide high-quality videos and record legal training events, seminars and client briefings. Many of our international practice and business-services groups use these mechanisms for collaborating and capturing their team training sessions. All online training is accessible via our learning management system and through our enterprise search engine.

Selected online training is also repackaged for clients to access on our know-how repository elexica and the BLT Portal shared with other firms. A number of presentations that clients have attended have also been filmed and made available to clients and contacts as online training on elexica. In addition we provide a weekly video podcast service, which allows you to watch a video update covering a wide variety of legal topics and interests. Our podcasts are in interview style, featuring two co-presenters, and each podcast lasts for between five and six minutes. Our weekly video podcast is also available for iPod users to download to their iPods via the iTunes store.

Federation

The second phase of our smart working collaboration project was then to put in the infrastructure to be able to join our OCS environment to other people’s outside the firm. We now federate with Microsoft and a couple of other suppliers, for example, and are currently speaking to clients about federating with them, which is very exciting for us. I suspect that the cultural barriers may present more of a problem here than the technical ones.

Like most law firms we have had video conferencing rooms for a number of years and have kept this technology reasonably up to date. The problem is that it is only really the hardcore users (mainly central management) who use it to its full extent. There is a formality around booking a room and the video equipment, which seems to put people off, together with perceptions that the technology is complicated to use. Video conferencing from your desktop seems to be quite a good, simple alternative. We now have our video conferencing rooms integrated with OCS, which means that we can combine the two technologies. Last week we ran a conference in which we connected up five of our video conference units in five of our international offices to our video conferencing room in London. We also had a presentation going on in the same room, with a further 20 people watching this in a separate, larger, room, and another, approximately 100, people spread around our global network watching the presentation and listening via audio. The whole thing was very interactive! Technology also allows the IT technicians to manage video conferences remotely, including from their homes.

What has it done for us?

From a practical perspective, instant messaging has certainly reduced some of the strain on our e-mail server. If each instant message replaces an e-mail, there are theoretically 42,000 fewer e-mails in the mail system and in the archive vault. However, our risk director wanted to ensure that instant messages were being used in the right way. We have published guidelines around best practice and we are reviewing them in light of our plans to federate with clients so that we have any risk issues covered.

What have we learnt from using these new technologies? Exploiting technology that allows people to work more flexibly has been an important focus for the firm. However, as most people know, getting the technology right is only a very small part of the equation. We have concluded that there are no technical barriers to working in these new ways. The barriers are more owing to culture, management styles, barriers of trust, and issues with measuring productivity at a distance – and not forgetting the sheer volumes of paper which seem to weigh us down. We have enough to stretch from our office to the new Olympic stadium in Stratford and twice around the track!

However, we did learn that certain personality types are better suited to flexible working than others, and that the more ‘transactional’ in nature your role is, the harder it is to work at a distance. For example, if you are a project manager or a developer in the IT department there are large chunks of your work that you can happily do at home, but if you are an infrastructure analyst it is harder. We would expect this to translate into different types of fee-earning roles in a broadly similar way.

We also discovered that there is an unquantifiable, but present, deterioration in the amount of collaboration that goes on simply because those coffee machine moments are no longer there. We experience high levels of this kind of informal collaboration because we work in an open-plan office, and we have worked in this way for years. However, the flip side of this is that we are now more effective in the use of our time. We ensure that meetings are structured properly, with purpose, an agenda, and minutes and actions.

There are definitely significant work/life balance advantages to employees working flexibly of course, and there are advantages to the firm in that it gives people the opportunity to time shift their day to accommodate the global time zones within which they need to work. For example, we will often have trainers running Live Meeting training sessions with our Hong Kong office from their homes before they come to work.

What next for Simmons?

In terms of technology we are already piloting the OCS client on iPhones, so that we can have presence and instant messaging on the move, and we will also be looking at the Blackberry client shortly.

What we don’t have at the moment is a bridge to allow us to have multiple video pictures when on an OCS call. The way it works at the moment is that you have one video picture on the screen, and this automatically switches to the person who starts speaking.

In terms of big cultural change, we are also now just starting to undertake the building work for our ‘workplace review pilot’. Taking a lot of what we have learnt over the last 18 months we are now extending the concepts of collaborative and flexible working to our legal departments, and we are reconfiguring one floor of our CityPoint office accordingly. Approximately 100 people will essentially be working open plan, and while a number of law firms have already taken this step. it is quite a change for us. It is also very much levelling the playing field, with partners, associates and secretaries all working more closely. Additionally everybody will have the same amount of linear filing storage, and complying with this will hopefully remove some of our paper burden. If the pilot is successful we will extend it to the remainder of the London office and combine this with looking at more remote working across the legal departments.

Abby.Ewen@simmons-simmons.com