If 2020 was about surviving coronavirus and lockdown, 2021 is most certainly about rebuilding and making up for lost time. With the Covid-19 vaccine rollout progressing well, and pubs and shops reopening ahead of a supposed return to normality by late June, going back to the office is becoming a reality.
As The Legal 500 UK editor Georgina Stanley points out in ‘Living at work’, the past year has seen the stigma that working from home is less productive than long office hours eradicated, but we have also lost the benefits of spontaneous social interaction with clients and colleagues and the ease of separation between work and home life. As for the younger generation of lawyers, they are suffering from a lack of face time with clients and partners, losing out on crucial training and development.
But while working from home has had its limitations, productivity hasn’t dropped – if anything it has been enhanced – and our eyes have been opened to the idea that working flexibly opens up a much greater opportunity to combine a real life with work life. A chance to dispel the insidious culture of presenteeism and open up the possibility that yes, you can have it all – family, career, exercise and mental wellbeing – as long as you and the firm that you work for recognise that the key is managing your time creatively.
To hopefully a minority of senior and managing partners, this will be complete anathema. They can’t say it anymore – not in the current environment – but they secretly despise WFH, fearing that they will lose out with clients if their lawyers are at home while the competition have a fully staffed London office of despondent but obedient associates. This perhaps is down to the fact that they had to earn their stripes by being beasted by partners who never challenged a client’s demands, no matter how unreasonable. For whom partnership was the holy grail attained by sleeping at the office, working weekends, being on call 24-7 through holidays and having a more committed relationship with the office security guards than with their families. And, ultimately, by worshipping their false idol, the billable hour, rather than focusing on the quality of output. Some just cannot accept that things have changed. Even Goldman Sachs was forced to react in March when junior bankers finally took umbrage officially with working 95-hour weeks. Many clients would now argue that the fewer sycophantic vampires moving to the upper echelons of the legal profession, the better.
Long before the coronavirus it was clear the tide had turned. The younger generation of lawyers were making it clear that partnership at any cost was no longer attractive, especially as firms had devalued its status by convincing themselves that salary/fixed-share partnership would fool the ambitious. Initiatives like the Mindful Business Charter have demonstrated that clients also recognise that taking a pragmatic approach to work/life balance produces far more desirable outcomes for everyone. The concept of ‘work hard, play hard’ may become a reality rather than a motto. Or rather, ‘work smart, play better’.
As the box ‘Post-pandemic plans’ shows, many of the leading firms are embracing a hybrid policy of home/office working. Mishcon de Reya has even told all staff ‘they can work when and where they want as long as they can do their job effectively’. The key to all of this is creativity – both from firms and individuals. Finding ways to do the job even better than before and feel like you are being measured on the quality of your output rather than your ability to kiss the boots of clients and senior partners 24/7.
No-one wants to be homebound all the time – everyone thrives on meeting clients, colleagues and opponents face-to-face – but neither does anyone want to spend hours commuting every day, wasting money on train fares and Pret sandwiches to compete in a ridiculous endurance challenge under strip lighting.