How law firms keep their legal teams engaged when working remotely
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According to LOEB leadership 67% of lawyers and law firm staff want to continue working remotely even after the pandemic is over. This statistic may not sound surprising to you when you read the majority of reviews from employees at top legal firms in the UK on Glassdoor. Legal employees state that they have poor work-life balance and feel particularly overworked. Legal teams are some of the most hardworking employees you can find and work exceptionally long hours compared to most industries. Law firms are filled with ambitious individuals who will do what it takes to get the job finished. But this heavy workload comes at a cost. Alongside the complaint of having poor work-life balance a lot of legal teams spoke about the following issues very frequently;
Very hierarchical work structures
Slow and outdated technology
Minimal training and lack of career progression
With this information in mind it’s essential that law firms pay attention to employee inclusion, modern technology and supportive training. The first step is to ensure that you are transparent with your legal team especially when they are working remotely.
How do I ensure transparency with my legal team?
To engage your legal teams when they are working from home you need to make them feel like their opinion is valued. A lot of the reviews which spoke about heavy hierarchical structures stated that they felt there was a lot of secrecy at the top in their law firm. It made them feel disconnected from their management and most assumed that this was why there was a lack of career progression.
This feeling of disconnection where employees felt like management were closing themselves off from less senior members of the team can be magnified when working remotely. If you are not seeing your team as regularly as usual, it’s crucial that you keep them in the loop with everything that’s going on. It’s also crucial to give them an avenue where they can share their thoughts and feelings.
Ensure your internal comms engages your legal team from all angles
To keep your legal team engaged when working remotely it’s essential that you ramp up your internal comms. Our clients do this by targeting their comms at staff from all angles. One simple email just won’t suffice. If you really want to make an impact and make your law firm feel involved 100% of the time, you’ve got to have a tailored and well-thought comms strategy.
Get feedback
Our clients post their articles and news on our platform and it allows their staff to leave comments and reactions. These reactions can be 😍🙂🙁. Giving your legal team the opportunity to share their feedback with you allows you to do three things.
Your law firm will take on a culture of communication. Your legal teams will feel valued and respected by having the option to share their thoughts and opinions. This lifts the heavy hierarchical structure and shows that you are willing to listen.
You can get a vibe of how your ‘office’ is feeling even when your legal team aren’t in the office.
You can tailor your comms strategy accordingly. Being able to view employee feedback across every piece of information you share means that you will start to know what your employees like and dislike. This will play a crucial part in engaging your legal teams in the most effective way possible.
Accommodate for your legal team’s busy schedule
The majority of the time, your busy legal team won’t have time to read your comms when you send them. You need to make it as easy as possible for your employees to stay up to date.
Our clients manage this by using the notification dots on the their posts. These are little markers which indicate to an employee that they have unread news or articles.
Legal staff can easily see when they have missed an update.
They will also have an alerts centre which gives them a list overview of all the unread items they have to get through.
A red icon will display the number of articles the employee has to read.
On top of this you can send out news summaries daily, weekly, or monthly. Every time you publish a piece of content you will be asked if you want to include them in a roundup. These are perfect for your busy employees, or those that have taken any time off. They can quickly skim through all the latest updates and not miss a thing.
See what is and isn’t being read
When your team are remote it’s hard to know what they need. You need to be able to see what content they are clicking on and reading. Being able to see engagement scores of your articles allows you to understand what your legal team find the most useful. From here, you can start to build out content in those areas to ensure that you are fully supporting your team even when you’re not there.
How do I show my legal team support when they are working from home?
Paul Bennett - a partner at Bennett Briegal who advises law firms suggests three key tips to keeping your legal team engaged when working from home.
Pick up the phone or schedule a video call to talk to members of your team, not about work but about life, how they are, what's working for them, and how you as a supervisor or manager can help.
Think about the impact of screen time and working from home. Are the emails you send out of hours as you have taken the afternoon off for childcare being read by colleagues out of hours. Adding a note saying: "I'm emailing out of hours as it suits me to do so but this can wait for your attention in office hours" is helpful as is delaying your emails until office hours using the delay delivery tool.
In terms of supervision of junior staff think about the power of a 1-2-1 chat and a shared screen piece of feedback designed to help build the junior member of staff trust and confidence in you as a supervisor.
His approach is focused on treating your legal employees like people rather than number. Taking time to show an interest in them and make them feel human. Show that you understand they have other commitments aside from work and use one on one sessions to fully support each individual member of your team.
Warren Robertson - Consultant Solicitor at Engleharts Solicitors also agrees. He feels that employee engagement is a lot about the firm in question. He states “For younger workers they will need supervision, general guidance and to feel part of things. Some businesses have had regular Zoom meetings, including socials. Others have had regular one on one video sessions. Engleharts have encouraged fee earners to take video training courses as part of keeping them up to date with changes within the law.“
Send digital tokens of appreciation
According to Social Cast, 69% of employees would work harder if they felt their efforts were better appreciated. This one can be a hard pill to swallow for managers, you immediately wonder how much more work you would get done in a week if everyone pushed a little harder. But, you also realise that you don’t have enough hours in your day to do your own work let alone go round to each member of your legal team and tell them what a great job they are doing.
This is why most of the clients we work with send digital achievements. These are stickers or trophies which you send to your employees when you think they have done a great job. You can tailor them to say what you want so they fit with the milestones which are prevalent in your industry. Your legal team will get an email or notification stating they have an achievement but they won’t be able to see it until they open it in the app. People who send the achievements can also write little notes to explain why they have awarded it to the employee.
Best of all anyone can send an achievement. It isn’t just down to managers to show their appreciation, colleagues can send rewards to anyone who they think has done a good job.
Improving the technology in your law firm for your remote legal team
Having outdated technology when in the office is not ideal, however you can cope because there will always be someone there to help you out. When your legal team are working remotely and something isn’t working or they can’t get through to someone, it can have disastrous consequences. There is so much technology available to us to improve our operations that there really is no excuse to not be able to work more flexibly. Below are our top tech recommendations for law firms who are now working more remotely.
DocuSign
Legal firms spend a huge amount of time getting clients and witnesses to sign papers and chasing forms. A lot of law firms still do this manually, sending important documentation by post. This can take up a hell of a lot of time, not to mention the fact that you lose a sense of control when people are sending things out of the office.
DocuSign is an eSignature tool for legal firms which allows your clients to sign their documentation from any smart device. This drastically reduces return times and streamlines your legal teams’ work processes. You won’t have to worry about employees leaving home to post forms, losing them in the post or not knowing when documents have been returned.
Slack
This tool is an absolute no brainer for any team looking to work more flexibly. It allows your team to directly message each other, meaning questions and queries can be answered in seconds. You can’t expect your staff to wait for phone calls or emails, they need answers instantly when working from home. For example, your employee is on the phone to a client at home, the client asks a question which they are not too sure of. They can quickly send the question to you on slack you’ll see it instantly and answer, their client will be none the wiser.
Oplift Scan
As a law firm, you know the risk of handling personal and sensitive data, which means you can’t use the consumer scanning apps which upload to the public cloud or store data on the device and in the camera roll. By design, Oplift Scan is a privacy and GDPR compliant scanning alternative to apps like Scanbot or Office Lens.
Simply use your iPhone or iPad to scan documents then automatically wipe information after they have been securely sent to the correct place.
Scan. Send. Deleted.
Google Drive
This tool is free and incredibly easy to use. It allows your team to edit and work together on documents, spreadsheets and presentations in real time. You can upload files and anyone you allow can access them from anywhere at any time - as long as they have an internet connection. You just need to make sure that all of your legal team have a Google account.
Google Meet
No, we are not promoters of Google. We just find their solutions very useful when working more flexibly and they’re free. You can use Google Meet seamlessly on desktop, mobile or tablet, it’s incredibly easy to set up video calls and they all automatically sync to your calendar which everyone can see. You can collaborate and live stream meetings to 100,000 viewers at a time (should this need ever arise 🤣). It’s the perfect and easy solution for meetings when everyone is working remotely.
How do I emphasise training and career progression for my legal team whilst some are working remotely?
Legal teams seem to be keen to learn, given that a lot of reviews detailed their disappointment when there wasn’t much training. To guide their learning whilst they are working remotely you need to set up a positive learning cycle.
The steps which we follow are; guide - prompt - reward.
Guide - start with an individual's one to one session. Our clients use our Reporting platform as this allows them to seamlessly carry out an employee review. Whilst doing this they can assign tasks to the employee. This helps guide their learning and highlight areas where they need more training. Managers can assign a task to complete a certain playlist which will strengthen their skills. Playlists are the learning features our clients use. These take just 1-5 minutes to complete (this is to ensure they actually get completed and don’t take over from regular day to day tasks). Employees can jump in and out of them when they have time, they don’t have to completely finish one, it will save their progression and they can pick up where they left off.
Prompt - Once you have guided the employee to the correct training. It’s essential that you send regular prompts to ensure they complete it. Our clients use our notification feature. These pop up on an employees phone or tablet device. You can tailor the message and make them click through to the relevant playlist. For example you may say ‘Sarah, you’ve got a busy week ahead don’t forget to complete your legal tech training.’
Reward - You need to make sure you reward your employees for their training efforts. Doing this will set up a positive cycle for them and encourage them to learn again. Our clients use our digital achievements to reward their staff which were mentioned earlier.
How does this tie into career progression?
You can develop career plans by telling your employees what training modules they have to complete, which tasks they have to do and how many achievements they should be regularly receiving each month. Once they have completed these steps only then can they progress into the next position.
Using an employee app is an effective way to view your legal team’s progression in each of the steps mentioned above. They make it exceptionally easy to do this, even when your team are working remotely from different locations.
Managing your legal team remotely is all about using the best technology available to you. If you do it properly you can make your team feel engaged, supported and valued no matter where they are working from.
If you want help or support about technology for your legal teams, just get in touch.
