Feature

posted 5 Jun 2001 in Volume 4 Issue 2

Let’s make support effective!

Law firms, like other professional practices, have made significant investments in support services to fee earners. There is also, in our sector, a growing interest in improving cost effectiveness in this area. Glynne Roberts, of WDS Consulting, highlights some truths behind ineffectiveness and outlines how practices might review aspects of their support services. Significant gain potential is there for the taking but some challenging questions may need answering.

Virtually all organisations suffer from the same problem of relatively ineffective support services. This truism applies, even though there are significant differences in working practices between commercial organisation and professional (and, in particular, legal) practices.

Just what do we mean by ineffectiveness? Turning this question on its head, it is easiest to define effectiveness as doing the right, value adding things efficiently. Partners may maintain that their finance, or secretaries are very efficient, but their work is not truly effective if they spend part of their time correcting errors from other functions or tacking down missing information, albeit efficiently. A perhaps facile example: a partner or fee earner walking briskly would not be travelling effectively, if he or she had not been briefed adequately by a secretary or had not bothered to master an A-to-Z street map!

Conversely, there may be little real value in providing a Rolls Royce level of service in certain functions, when other, more vital ones, are under-funded. We have seen instances such as accounts payable teams putting technical journal and charity payments through fast response manual payment systems, while house services fail to ensure newly recruited lawyers have adequate IT infrastructure on arrival with which to ‘hit the ground running’.

Costs of support

Support is an expensive cost element for any professional practice. Consider that:

1. In many practices, support staff account for up to 50 per cent of total headcount,

2. In the City, salary plus overheads may amount to £30k per annum for a word processing operator – while outside London, similar costs for a debt collector could be in the order of £20k per annum.

Where do time and money go?

You could adapt an old adage to say “Look after support costs and the fee margin will tend to look after itself”. Perhaps an oversimplification but consultancy work demonstrates that firms fail consistently to get true value from staff. We believe that legal practices are no better, nor any worse, than other business sectors in this respect.

Try putting managers in front of a flip-chart and debate this assertion: “You only get half of what you pay for in staff costs.” Our research shows these percentages of time lost to be, on average, the vital ones:

* 14% from handling queries and errors,

* 10% using inappropriate processes,

* 8% due to staff inexperience,

* 8% from irregular workflows,

* 8% from below average effort.

Of course, these are average findings and all do not apply in every firm – but how many firms can hold hand on heart and say “We have tackled all this already”.

Benchmarking – how valid?

Some organisations, including legal practices, reckon they have a good health check by benchmarking support staff costs, ratios etc against other firms in the same sector. Benchmarking has a number of virtues but suffers from two key potential problems:

1. How honest are participants?

2. Are business mix and environment sufficiently similar to enable a fair comparison?

Some commercial organisations have had to go to extreme lengths to obtain valid and honest comparators. For example, a company producing coated aluminium products decided to benchmark itself against a manufacturer of chocolate coated biscuits – only this way, stepping outside their own business sector, could management be sure of honest answers.

Try a health check!

Effective support depends on a healthy relationship between INPUT AND OUTPUT.

The first step in assessing the effectiveness of support functions is to score your operations against certain key questions, which frequently relate to the area concerned:

* Is support well organised across functions and time?

* Is support well run or does it suffer from weak management?

* Signs of lack of team work between team or group members?

* How well do fee-earners and support staff work together?

* Are you sure most value adding functions are adequately funded?

* How effective are training and development?

* Are “tools” right?

* Does support free up fee earners’ time?

* Do you have quantified measures of input and output?

If your organisation scores ‘negative points’ on more than one of these questions, arguably you should undertake a review of support. However, given the considerable size of support functions in most legal practices, the first decision should be how large an area should be tackled.

If you start swimming, you can dive straight in at the deep end or walk in from a shallow shore. We recommend the latter! Tackle a group or division, rather than the whole firm and export success.

Reviewing support functions

A proficient review of support, as of other functions, should aim to provide senior partners with answers to the following question:

* How is (and should be) time spent?

* Is staff experienced enough?

* Is full productivity being achieved?

* Are processes lean but effective?

* And how do we best re-align staff funding for most value adding activities?

Having decided to review a group, division or specific function, you now need to plan how to carry out the project. In summary, there are three stages to a review, which can be expected to last some eight weeks:

Set up: Selling & planning

Diagnostic: Fact finding

Reporting: Recommendations

Now let’s look at each stage in detail:

Set-up: weeks 1 – 2

Arguably, this is the most important phase of a review – or, at least, the one with the most potential for damage if not conducted properly and fully.

In my line management experience, the two most emotive issues in business were often company cars and secretaries – other aspects of support services cannot be far behind. So, it’s essential to devote time to selling in benefits to both support staff and fee-earners – the latter may need winning over from just expecting service at any cost.

Time invested in assuring support that this is not just a cost cutting exercise reaps benefits such as greater co-operation – especially important as a review team should include an office manager or secretarial team leader. Key activities during set-up are:

1. Brief staff fully,

2. Define business strategy,

3. Run a focus group for staff,

4. Run a similar focus group for fee-earners,

5. Agree with staff key task titles for an activity analysis to take place in the next phase.

(Focus groups, referred to above, are opportunities for staff to express views on matters that impede effective performance and service delivery). Last but not least, issue a detailed project plan to all staff involved.

Diagnostic: weeks 3 – 6

This four-week phase is the main fact gathering exercise and should lead to your presentation of ‘emerging findings’.

To get a bird’s eye view of how staff spend time, they should complete customised diary sheets over, say, two weeks, recording time spent against agreed task titles. Summarising this data into a spreadsheet will identify for any support group:

* Which tasks consume major amounts of time,

* Whether enough time is spent on supervision,

* How much query resolution, error correction or searching for missing information goes on.

These are major performance issues in terms of productive use of time. Just one guideline: consultancy studies have shown that for every 100 hours of subordinates’ working time, managers, section leaders etc, need to spend 10 hours on supervision. Lack of enough supervisory input features in most investigations into poorly running areas.

Secretaries, WP operators and other support staff are just as involved in processes as people in accounting functions. So you can chart, for example, the life of a document from its creation by a fee-earner, transfer by a secretary to a WP function, text creation and checking, return to the author and, where relevant, charging for the document via finance. You should aim to carry out these process reviews while staff are completing diary sheets for the activity analysis – this helps to bring fact gathering strands together at the same time.

Questionnaires should also be issued to senior staff at the start of this diagnostic phase. Key issues for managers and supervisors to appear in these forms are:

* A view of their objectives,

* The three key bugbears in their working life,

* A rating of their, and their subordinates’, skills and experience.

Any bugbears quoted need fleshing out by discussion, while action to close skills gaps (that prevent 100 per cent performance) will feature in an action plan.

Now examine reporting data used for monitoring the department. “What data?” some supervisors ask, where regular operational reviews do not take place. Ideally, performance data specifies input (hours of resource used), output, service levels achieved, both complaints and compliments received etc. Where necessary, remind support managers that if this operation was an outsourced agency run by you, you would review performance regularly, if the success of this business affected your livelihood directly. This diagnostic list is not meant to be exhaustive – but by the end of week six you should aim to present ‘emerging findings’ with draft proposals for improvement.

Reporting: weeks 7 – 8

The third and final two-week phase develops and confirms recommendations. It also provides an opportunity to assess the relative importance to the business of different strands of support within a business area.

This technique, often called priority-based resourcing (PBR) requires managers to examine departments other than their own, recommend improved working practices and cost varying levels of service, stating benefits and limits of each service level.

Subsequently, a review board receives submissions for proposed service levels and assigns votes, thereby assessing the priority of each level within a function. Output of this exercise is agreed funding by activity.

Whether or not you incorporate PBR, these last two weeks should concentrate on confirming benefits of proposed arrangements and securing agreements to proposed changes in working practices.You may care to consider the following:

* Partners are often better at managing fee earners than support staff – so the latter need dedicated section heads and/or managers,

* Organising secretaries into large pools does not work – they are more likely to accept being grouped into small teams,

* Some fee earners do not appreciate the worth of support staff. The latter should be seen as the ‘home team’, and fee earners the ‘away team’,

* As a general rule, people prefer to be busy rather than under-occupied – making it easy to seek a 20 per cent increase in productivity,

* Support teams need leaders with management as well as IT skills,

* Where support staff are shown to be unproductive, the situation is the responsibility of management – wholesale replacement of staff is not the answer – you need a programme of required steady improvement,

* Ineffectiveness within support is down to poor demand planning, inadequate briefing, over expectation and poor source text by and from fee-earners.

The pay-off

Apart from enabling support to help fee-earners generate additional income by freeing up their time, support performance improvement itself can save money straight to the bottom line.

If staff performance and utilisation of twenty support employees is increased by 20 per cent and their payroll cost is £30k per person, financial benefits can be in the order of £120k per annum. We suggest that such savings are well worth investing time and effort to identify and achieve.

Glynne Roberts is operations director of WDS Consulting Limited. He can be contacted at: glynne.roberts@wdscl.freeserve.co.uk.