A talent for flexibility

The ‘war for talent’ in the legal profession shows no sign of letting up, with the lure of packages put together by competing firms frequently winning over notions of loyalty. But work/life balance is also a big concern for today’s lawyers. Addleshaw Goddard finds progressive flexible working policies can really make a difference when it comes to retention.

By Judith Hardy, HR director, Addleshaw Goddard

Like all firms in our sector, attracting and retaining talent is accepted as a strategic imperative. It is well-known that recruiting talent is a competitive game, but today the spotlight is on retention and for Addleshaw Goddard it is top of the agenda – not least because we are still a growing firm.

Businesses with a good track record of attracting, retaining and developing the best people adopt a balanced, sensible approach to a wide range of issues. Clearly, there are certain policies and benefits employers just can’t afford to get wrong, especially those of greatest importance to their people. For example, it is widely accepted that simply paying competitive salaries will not necessarily lead to a motivated workforce or a healthy set of retention statistics.

In fact, as with many employers in professional services, it is not as if we don’t know what our people want and what will help us keep them. Commentators, industry-wide surveys and numerous editorials have discussed associates’ increasing demand for work/life balance – and how this is resulting in increasing numbers opting to leave the profession or switch careers to in-house roles.

Although our firm makes The Times’ ‘Best 100 Places to Work’ list, we also have an ongoing appetite to understand and act upon issues that are important to our people. This year we commissioned a comprehensive opinion survey for the second time in two years. It was carried out by an independent third party. The results provided extensive feedback on a range of areas, but generally confirm that flexibility is overwhelmingly top of the agenda for all our people. Most striking of all was the consistency of the results. Fee earners and business-services employees, men and women, all had the same priority – interesting work and a sensible work/life balance.

Providing this attractive ‘career offer’ requires a serious investment by professional-services firms. There is no quick fix, and the emphasis needs to be on building a robust culture that embraces new ways of working, as well as introducing the right benefits to reflect the needs of different people.

Driver of diversity

For a long time flexible working has been linked in to the firm’s diversity agenda, particularly in relation to female talent. Of course recruiting women isn’t the issue – Addleshaw Goddard’s trainee intake is roughly 55 per cent female. It is keeping talented women that is the challenge – and flexible working is a strong driver.

Earlier this year Addleshaw Goddard was the only law firm in the Aurora/Times list of the ‘Top 50 Best Places for Women to Work’. The lack of professional-services organisations in this list does not necessarily mean our industry is failing to address the diversity debate, but it does suggest we still have more work to do if we are to provide an environment that is as attractive as many of our clients.

Developing an approach to flexible working is by no means the only way law firms and other professional organisations can do more to retain women, but it is certainly a critical area.

Challenge of flexibility

Nevertheless, there are many HR and financial directors in professional services who will have experienced some of the thorny challenges of implementing flexible working. The single-track career model, the input-driven culture of hourly billing rates and the performance metrics of fees per lawyer all tend to leave flexible working models in the ‘too difficult’ box. The observation might be that it used to be something we thought mattered to some of our people some of the time, but not most of our people most of the time.

As well as challenging the established traditional mindset of what a professional-services firm looks like and how its people operate, there is also no getting away from the fact that flexible working creates new challenges in terms of balancing resources and servicing the client. But if they want to improve their respective retention rates, all firms need to promote and evolve ways of working more flexibly while still driving business performance in a competitive arena. They can’t afford to say it just won’t work.

Of course the statutory right to request to work flexibly is by no means new, but many professional-services firms have feared the financial and operational burden on their businesses because of the need to accommodate such requests. The resurgent ‘war for talent’ simply means that the legislative push reinforces a reality that today’s associates can and will be more open about what matters to them – and vote with their feet if their firms don’t deliver.

From our firm’s perspective, and indeed for any organisation, it is important to acknowledge that flexibility in the workplace is a key priority for its people. Any good employer, or good business, will want to balance the individual’s wishes with business requirements and the needs of clients.

Putting policies in place

So how is Addleshaw Goddard itself responding? First, the firm has examined its existing flexible working policies to ensure they reflect people’s needs by offering greater choice, not simply standard part-time working hours. We brought together and publicised the wide variety of working arrangements on offer, including annualised hours, term-time working, compressed hours, part-time working and job-share arrangements. As a result, we are starting to see an increase in the number of people requesting flexible working for reasons other than the usual ones connected with childcare. In common with other employers, we don’t make any distinction on the basis of the reasons for the request, taking each application on its individual merits. Some 12 per cent of the workforce currently have formalised flexible working arrangements.

Similarly, the firm makes no distinction on the career level of the individual making a flexible working request. One of our flexible working role models is a partner in the real-estate division, who works four days per week. He joined the firm in January 2001 as a partner from another firm. Two years later he chose to leave the profession for 18 months to spend some time travelling. He returned to the UK 25 countries later and rejoined the firm, again as a partner in the real-estate division, but this time working four days a week to maintain a healthy balance between career and home life – and to enjoy his many interests and hobbies away from the firm.

This partner heads a team of four other property solicitors, all at varying levels of qualification, from junior to senior associates. Flexible working arrangements are encouraged in the team, one associate working three days a week with another working one day from home and utilising the firm’s home-working technology. A variety of transactions are allocated according to the level of experience, and there is ample opportunity to manage workflow around the flexible working arrangements. Consequently, associates working flexibly are able to maintain a high quality workload, appropriate to their levels of experience. They can also, therefore, continue to progress their careers in line with
their expectations.

This particular example also reflects another growing trend – for individuals to take an extended break outside of their annual holiday entitlement. We have sabbatical policies that cover everyone in the firm and have seen an increasing level of interest and take-up at all levels.

Creating a culture through communication

While these are good individual examples of a flexible approach, our opinion survey found most people appear to want a more informal approach to flexible working. Rather than contractual arrangements, for example, they would like the opportunity to ‘take back’ time that may have been worked ‘above and beyond’. This is where the culture challenge occurs, as the application of rules and policies for a relatively small number is one thing but a culture of flexible working that could apply to everyone in the firm is something entirely different.

The firm has considered what could be learnt from clients and looked at its business model, and it has identified some levers to pull to help drive the desired culture change.

It is clear that the organisations that have been most successful at introducing flexible working have cultures that focus their performance-measurement metrics on outputs (results), rather than inputs (time in the office). There is still some way to go to develop the exact metrics, but this is critical to shifting the culture from one where flexible working is seen as a people-driven ‘concession’ to a culture that brings real business benefits to the bottom line, not only in terms of talent retention but also in productivity and efficiency. The challenge many professional-services firms now face is embedding flexibility within their organisations. Communication of initiatives is the basic starting block.

Using the opinion survey results, Addleshaw Goddard arranged a series of briefings and discussions for partners and staff, while promoting ‘the conversation’ that brings flexible working to the centre of the agenda and creates an environment where it is expected that the challenge and the importance of addressing it are discussed. The firm promotes awareness of the formal flexible working policies in place, encourages people to explore them if they are interested and, most of all, emphasises that there is no single solution. It also stresses that flexible working needs to recognise the needs of clients, team members and managers, as well as the individual.

Adapting to circumstances

With offices in London, Leeds and Manchester, the three-office model is now well established, pulling together the best people to work on a particular project or client transaction irrespective of their location. A by-product of this way of delivering client service is that high quality work can be seen to take place without people necessarily being in the same office or being ‘watched’. A ‘presenteeism’ culture simply doesn’t work for our firm and certainly doesn’t deliver value to our clients.

The firm is also making improvements to methods of monitoring work and sharing it out among associates. There is still a long way to go, but we are increasingly paying attention to making allocation of work among associates and teams more even, ensuring a fair distribution of expertise and challenging work. Of course this also helps to maximise utilisation levels, with conditions for more associates to reach the bonus threshold of 1,450 chargeable hours. At the same time we can focus the flexible working agenda around the time people are not doing client work. This is the opportunity mentioned earlier for people to ‘take back’ time when they are less busy.

If culture is the key to greater flexibility, then technology is an important enabler. Over the past couple of years we have invested heavily in IT infrastructure to pave the way for a more mobile working environment, including upgrading the network to make remote access quicker and more stable, as well as wireless capability, Blackberries and remote-access key fobs for those associates who want them. These have all enhanced the possibility of more informal flexible working and we are looking at ways of exploiting them more effectively and widely.

We know that different people have different needs and views of what flexible working actually means. Therefore, we try to provide as many options as possible, empowering people to work from home and ensuring that the technology infrastructure is in place to support this.

As an example, the firm participated in the government-backed Home Computer initiative, where a number of employees chose to buy a computer for home use, which they were then able to use occasionally to work from home.

Alternative careers

Flexibility is not just about different ways of working, however. For some it is about different career paths too. The lure of partnership is no longer the ‘Holy Grail’ that will ensure the brightest and best associates stay with us. In fact, there is an increasing trend for talented senior solicitors to ‘opt out’ of the partner career track – often because the demands, lifestyle and opportunities for partnership can be unattractive. This realisation led us to introduce a legal director role five years ago, which was profiled as a stand-out innovation by the Financial Times earlier this year.

The role breaks the traditional career-development path of associate through to partner by providing an alternative option for talented individuals. The role, which is not a bar to partnership, can be particularly attractive to those who want greater flexibility. As an example, in 2000, one of our partners had a six-month break following the birth of her son. Returning to work, she requested a more flexible working arrangement, opting for core hours of 10am to 4pm, which allowed her time at the beginning and end of the day for the nursery drop-off and collection. In 2002, promotion to the newly created role of legal director followed. The flexible working pattern continued until her second period of maternity leave in 2003. She still works flexibly where possible, and was promoted to partner in May 2006. Now she continues to act for (and manages the teams of) two high-profile clients, is responsible for a cross-site team of paralegals and is also heavily involved in the graduate recruitment programme.

Summary

Policies such as these illustrate the firm’s commitment to creating a flexible environment where individuals are encouraged to develop their careers while enjoying the rewards of a meaningful work/life balance.

There is an important lesson for us all though. If firms don’t adapt their traditional approach to talent management, many of their best people will be lost to organisations and industries that do offer a more flexible approach.

Judith Hardy is human resources director at Addleshaw Goddard. She can be contacted at judith.hardy@addleshawgoddard.com