Discussion

Main Board| Accommodation Wanted| Accommodation Offered
Start a new discussion on this board

Let your next career move come to you.

"Work/life balance"

Like many firms we have a global employee engagement survey where the scores for this phrase are unfavourable:

"I am able to manage my work responsibilities in a way that allows me to maintain a healthy balance between work and home."

I am now on a working group to address this.

I struggle with the conflict between employees' expressed desire for work-life balance and their actions that suggest otherwise, such as seeking more responsibilities, higher pay, hogging large accounts, foregoing holiday, and occasionally criticizing colleagues they perceive as less deserving.

Has anyone ever seen any quick wins or novel ideas to help resolve this conflict?

I think a lot of it is driven by fear of losing things that one might feel difficult to get back: pay, status, interesting projects, control and so on...

I think we will end up with the usual tepid recommendations like "review flexible working hours, time-off policies and wellness programs."

 

 

 

Does it matter if people find they don't have enough free time? They have chosen this life, this level of pay, this job. If they leave there are vast numbers of good people champing at the bit to take their place. Most of those with loads of work will put up with it. Obviously most of us would like £1m a year without having to work for it but that is pie in the sky.

So I suppose I would start with the problem - are we losing staff we find hard to replace to other firms with shorter hours but similar pay and/or do we have a lot of staff going to the Priory driven mad by the job which is causing problems with our staffing needs?

 

Or may be HR needs to recruit people with no life outside work with no friends who work like a dog and are happy to work 7 days a week and not hire people who are not strong and who want short hours?

not a helpful response, admittedly, but any cünt who cares about any of the things apart from pay in your list is a cünt: "pay, status, interesting projects, control and so on.."

Admittedly it's a manufacturing business but mate of mine has moved to a four day week with people doing an extra hour on those four days and reports that productivity is up (mainly as a result of spending less time starting up and shutting down machinery) and his staff are much happier on a Monday morning especially those with kids who now get to take their kids to school and pick them up on a Friday and the like.

We worked out where the real pinch points were for over-work and hired to fill out the team.

This is the correct answer but not the sort that a working group like this makes!  I think my team is fine - they certainly take all their holiday and we don't have a retention problem - but working groups like this are supposed to come up with flashy initiatives that catch the eye of the CEO.

Trust me, the CEO will be a cynical sod who knows exactly what the issue is and what could really help.

The working group is just a thing to make the employees feel empowered and they mostly just want a bit of window dressing that allows them to go "rah rah rah " so that people feel a bit better (as it's come from the staff themselves) rather than actually fixing it.

Is it a law firm or a corporate business?

In the corporate world, there are small things that can be done with little impact on the business.

Things like a family outing day where the whole company will close early on a Friday and they have an event setup for employees and their families.

Mental Health days, where the business closes on a Friday and no one is allowed to login to work tools.

I've heard of "Duvet" days where (usually younger hungover staff) you can call in and take the day off for no special reason, deducted from your holiday time.  This is limited to once per quarter.

There are things you can stagger or just use as rewards such as, "you did well this week, finish work at 2 on Friday"

 

I think a few easy wins 

Have everyone take at least 2 weeks holiday a year when they are not contactable (unless the actual firm is collapsing) - even partners 

Have senior staff who are parents more visibly parent - calendars with school runs and doctors appointments in, leaving on time etc. encourage junior staff to do the same 

Don't enforce WFH rules for new parents, carers etc - just accept they will be in less 

None of this costs anything 

Or may be HR needs to recruit people with no life outside work with no friends who work like a dog and are happy to work 7 days a week and not hire people who are not strong and who want short hours?

Pretttttyyyyyy dumb stuff

Shut down the email servers from 17:30-8:30. 

That would stress me out.. knowing that at 8.30 I'm going to get 100 emails dumped on me at the same time, all needing top priority.

See I run that system and leave my work phone either at work or locked in my home office once I'm done for the day unless there is a particular reason not to.

Have senior staff who are parents more visibly parent - calendars with school runs and doctors appointments in, leaving on time etc. encourage junior staff to do the same 

 

I like this one.  We already do many of the other things like shutting the office early on bank holiday weekends.  I don't like the idea of locking people out because as Eddie says this may make people even more stressed, although you could argue it forces people to plan ahead better.

If you ask the Q in the OP then most people are going to say, yeah I'd like more time not working please.

Re the phrasing: "I am able to manage..." doesn't anyone disagreeing with the statement set themselves up for time-management training or something? 

To address the negative responses, maybe you need to drill down a bit into the statement and ask people why they can't "manage their work responsibilities in a way that allows [them] to maintain a healthy balance between work and home." 

Train partners to manage clients’ expectations and allocate work properly.

We are all insecure “yes men”. We all fear that if we don’t work hard and sacrifice our own time, someone else will.  You can at least try to mitigate that at a client level.  You’ll never get rid of it.

This can be a symptom of poor quality support staff - perhaps those with billing / fee earning responsibility would get more done if the support staff were better.  Blame the support staff and perhaps hire more of them. 

 

Sorry, bit flippant. In the end though, the bosses have to model the right behaviour themselves and do it visibly.

I have adult children working in fairly demanding skilled graduate jobs. But there are huge differences in the work culture. The best is a UK based global engineering firm, where the senior people leave by 6pm, take their holidays, step up and take responsibility with customers for delays or faults, etc etc.

are we losing staff we find hard to replace to other firms with shorter hours but similar pay

That is the crux of it - if so, make the appropriate adjustments, if not, KBO.  

The "visibly parenting" is a good one.  I did my best to model it when I was the most senior woman on my team.  However, it is often the case that women are given the side eye for leaving early for the school play and men are congratulated for it.

Ultimately the whole set up of the profession is wrong for work-life balance.  The working days comes from a time when one partner worked out of the home and the other one parented and facilitated the working partner.  To really turn the dial firms need a complete rethink on how worklife is structured.  Law firms are far too conservative to think about it creatively.  Moving away from the billable hour would help to stop driving the long-hours culture in law, but clients have been wanting that for years and it isn't happening in any significant way.  See what I said about law firms being too conservative.

And they’re all full of psychopaths waiting if not actively conspiring to make their colleagues fail and preferably leave. Seriously, these c unts deserve everything they get. 

I still fail to understand why there isn't a top notch law firm in somewhere that doesn't require £600k for a glass shoebox with £10k a year service charges that just staffs deals on two shifts, day and night, and paying the people local megabucks to work there. Latham's offices should be 20 mins from Manchester airport/west coast mainline station. I'd work there for 50% of my current salary and an employer rented house on the edge of the Peak District. It's effectively the converse of Dickson Minto where they paid you shitty Scottish Law Soc wages to endure London living on the basis your parents lived in the Grange and could accommodate you in their London flat they used when they went south for board meetings. 

I reckon the American clients don't trust anything outside of London. Nothing to do with quality. It'll make them feel insecure going back to their board in Boise Idaho. They have a head office in Barnsley? How do you even say that. Bansly? Barrnsley? Let's just go with the other guys. 

Join the discussion

Login Register