Vol. 75, No. 4, April
2002
Balancing Work and Life
Making the Business Case for Balanced Hours
The shrinking economy doesn't attenuate our need for work/life
balance. Replace a focus on insecurity with a plan to make the business
case for balance to your firm or organization. Here's a strategy for
demonstrating the equity and profitability of balanced hours.
by Ellen Ostrow
THE NEED FOR BUSINESSES to enable employees to balance their work and
personal lives has not changed simply because the economy has slowed. If
anything, the events of Sept. 11 have been a reminder of the
preciousness of our time with loved ones and the costs of squandering
it.
Ellen Ostrow , Ph.D., is the founder of
LawyersLifeCoach.comTM, providing personal and career
coaching for lawyers. She is editor of the free online newsletter, Beyond the Billable
Hour.
Despite changes in the economy, certain realities remain:
- Women now constitute almost 30 percent of the American bar and about
50 percent of law school entering classes.
- Most women attorneys will become mothers during the course of their
careers.
- Current billable hours requirements are incompatible with normal
family life and of questionable validity as measures of commitment or
success.
- Research consistently indicates that work/life balance is associated
with employee satisfaction, productivity, and retention - for both women
and men.
- There has been a profound values shift with regard to work/life
balance. Men, especially those in dual career marriages, want to
participate actively in their families' lives. This cultural change
appears to be quite stable.
- There are insufficient numbers of men in the new labor pool to meet
the demand for new lawyers - and many of these men will choose employers
based on the same criterion driving women: the availability of flexible
schedules to achieve work/life balance. This is NOT just a "women's
issue."
- It generally costs a law firm 150 percent of a lawyer's annual
salary to recruit and train a replacement.
- The corporate world has successfully developed effective work/life
balance initiatives in order to retain a diverse workforce. These same
corporations will seek comparable diversity in choosing legal
representation.
- If legal employers want to retain their most talented attorneys,
they will have to adopt effective balanced hour policies. Even in the
current economic slowdown, a gifted woman attorney will find employment
options that allow her the flexibility to be both lawyer and
mother.
The Strategy
The following is a strategy for establishing your value as an
attorney to your firm or organization. It includes tactics for
demonstrating the profitability of a balanced hours program that offers
equal opportunities for advancement to women with family
responsibilities and to attorneys free of these commitments.
1) Clarify Your Priorities and Values. You're going
to need to develop a valued expertise and to campaign on your own
behalf. To do this effectively, you need to have a clear sense of the
kind of work you love to do and the kind of life you want to be living.
Look for a work setting with values compatible to your own.
Without a vision, it's easy for external demands to define your focus
and control your time.
2) Develop Expertise. Choose a practice area to
which you can be committed. Doing work you love enables you to sustain
interest and focus - the essential ingredients for success. Select a
practice area that is manageable within the context of your other
priorities and is marketable.
3) Promote Your Expertise. Share your knowledge with
lawyers in your organization. Have work successes published in your
newsletter. Send clippings to colleagues to demonstrate you're on top of
things. Demonstrate your value to the organization with a record of
effective performance and be sure others know what you've
accomplished.
4) Take Initiative. Go after the work you want; make
a plan to develop and strengthen skills; offer to contribute to
challenging projects; seek opportunities to meet people both within and
outside your firm with whom you might be able to develop a mutually
beneficial relationship.
5) Develop Excellent Communication Skills. Work on
your written and verbal communication. Notice how the people you admire
speak in meetings, to clients, superiors, and subordinates. Request
feedback from people you trust about how effectively you come across.
You want to become your own best advocate.
6) Show that You Can be a Good Team Player. Free
agents can be good team players. Volunteer for leadership roles on
projects and in carefully selected committees. Be a good listener.
Attend to group dynamics. Facilitate cooperation.
7) Develop Marketing Skills. Remember that every
time you talk to people about what they do and about your own work, you
have an opportunity to market your legal expertise. Share your knowledge
by writing articles or speaking to your target market. If your firm
doesn't teach marketing skills, acquire them through other forms of
training and coaching.
8) Make Alliances; Find Mentors. Even without a
formal mentoring program, you can take the initiative to develop your
own personal advisory board. Cultivate relationships with people you
admire, from whom you can learn, and who want to play a role in
facilitating your career development. Develop an alliance with a senior
attorney in a position of influence who can be your advocate when you
make your balanced hours proposal.
9) Seek Models and Best Practices for Balanced
Hours. Examine model balanced hours policies and agreements in
drafting your own. The Project for Attorney Retention, www.pardc.org;
The Boston Bar Association, www.bostonbar.org/wfcplan.htm; and the ABA
Commission on Women in the Profession, www.abanet.org/women offer
excellent models and suggestions.
Contact other attorneys, within and outside of your organization, who
have negotiated balanced hours schedules. If your firm or organization
has a written policy, be sure to follow the parameters while tailoring
it to your specific needs.
10) Be Flexible. It's important to find a schedule
that fits with your own needs as well as those of your organization.
Make sure your priorities are explicit so your firm knows what it can
realistically expect of you.
11) Don't Settle. The Project for Attorney Retention
has specified the criteria for effective balanced hours policies.
Proportional hours for proportional pay with proportional advancement
should be built into the plan. There is no reason for you to be removed
from partnership track - you'll be developing your skills and paying
your dues - even if you're doing it at a bit slower pace.
12) Make the Business Case. Remember that it will
cost your firm at least 150 percent of your salary to recruit someone to
replace you. A new recruit will need time to get up to speed on your
projects. All the relationships you've cultivated with clients will be
lost. Be subtle in your delivery of this message - but be sure to keep
it in mind.
Decide if you want fewer clients or fewer projects. More importantly,
decide which work you want to continue to do. Clearly communicate your
commitment to continuing on these projects and clarify how you plan to
sustain your involvement.
You'll need to stay connected, so be sure to include your technology
needs in your proposal. This also communicates what you'll continue to
contribute if you're retained.
The best business case is in the product. Set realistic goals and
work efficiently. Employees who change to balanced hours schedules often
become more productive. It's imperative that your productivity be
visible. Gender stereotypes lead people to underestimate the competence
and commitment of women. You'll need to provide the evidence to dispel
the assumptions.
13) Backlash. Be prepared to deal with backlash from
attorneys who have not reduced their hours. In a perfect world, backlash
would be decreased by a policy that is available to everyone and by
proactive management decisions to staff cases appropriately to avoid
overburdening attorneys on standard hours schedules with work you used
to do.
If you do encounter backlash, candid discussions may ease tensions.
Remind colleagues that you are getting paid less than they are and, if
applicable, will advance more slowly toward partnership. Severe backlash
needs the intervention of management, however.
14) Include Nonbillable Time in Your Proposal. If
you're going to advance in your firm, you'll need opportunities to stay
in the loop, to participate on committees, for client development, and
for pro bono work. Schedule these activities into your balanced hours
proposal.
15) Periodically Reevaluate. Your needs and those of
your organization change over time. Update your agreement as needed,
including planning your transition back to standard hours, if you decide
to do that.
16) Beware of Schedule Creep. Unfortunately, until
balanced hours policies receive consistent support from management, some
partners will continue to ignore your schedule limits. Often, attorneys
on balanced hours schedules find themselves working 100 percent hours
for 60 to 80 percent pay.
Situations will surely arise that require you to work more hours than
dictated by your schedule. Compensate for this by reducing work time in
subsequent days or weeks.
If a partner consistently refuses to respect the limits of your
schedule, be bold in bringing this to the attention of management.
Remember - balanced hours policies are not accommodations for the
workchallenged. They should be mutually beneficial arrangements between
lawyers and their managers. You gain flexibility and your firm retains
your talent and increases its bottom line.
17) Stay Visible and Connected. You're a
professional, so you know you'll be available to clients when true
emergencies arise. Make sure colleagues and staff know under what
circumstances you can be contacted in your "off" hours.
Help the skeptics in your organization see that it matters little to
clients whether you're speaking to them from your office, a playground,
a nursing home, or the courthouse. Remember - no attorney is really
available 24/7. What happens when an attorney is arguing a motion or
taking a deposition?
Have plans for emergency childcare if you need to deal with a client
emergency and arrange backup coverage for clients so they'll feel
important and well-served.
If work is assigned to the first person seen, you'll need to make
partners aware of you even when you're not in the office. As a coach who
communicates with clients primarily via telephone and email, I know how
much you can accomplish with these forms of connection.
18) Be Assertive In Getting Good Assignments.
Actively and repeatedly request good work and complain if you don't get
it. Denying you the opportunity to succeed by giving you meaningless
assignments or refusing to work with you is discriminatory. Don't be
afraid to make a fuss if this happens.
If your organization is unresponsive to your genuine efforts to work
out mutually beneficial arrangements and to continue to contribute
valuable work while developing professionally, then this is a culture
with values incongruent with your own.
Why stay in an organization that doesn't value equal opportunity,
family care, and having a life?
Find a better place to work and let the firm pay the price of
replacing you.
Wisconsin
Lawyer