I was at the receiving end of a rant from a young associate recently, who I will call Mike. I don’t mind when Mike calls me to rant, usually late at night on his commute home from work. He needs to unload, and I am happy to be a sympathetic audience.
This time, Mike’s s rant was about his firm’s work from home (“WFH”) policy, which can be summed up as, “don’t do it.” The managing partner announced it just before he let people know that he will be working from his cabin in the mountains for a good chunk of the summer. I suspect that the leadership coaches might have something to say about the blatant hypocrisy.
I will leave it to the people at the top of the earnings pyramid in law firms to explain why WFH is such a bad thing. They seem to be the ones who are against it.
By way of background, I commuted a significant distance to work for 37 years, which contributed mightily to my back issues and stress levels. During the last 3 years of my career, which ended just as Covid started, I worked exclusively from home. This was back when we all thought that “Zooming” was just a way of travelling really, really, fast – in other words, I did it without the benefit of video meetings.
Of course, when I worked from home, I had many loyal clients and decent billings. As I have written before, there is an unwritten rule in law firms that if your numbers are high enough, you can do whatever the hell you want. So I did.
Here are my thoughts on WFH:
- When I started saving 2 hours a day commuting, I also began to go to the gym most days and feel more healthy and less stressed. A coincidence? I think not.
- Working from home allowed me to work when I felt most productive, which for me is early in the morning. Instead of wasting my best thinking time driving, I used it to analyze legal issues and draft documents.
- My clients could not have cared less about where I was. All they cared about was whether I answered their calls and got their work done on time.
- I no longer pretended to work late in the afternoon when my energy was waning.
- My associates, clerks, law students, and assistant knew where to get me when they needed my support. They still chose to call me instead of some of my partners who worked from the office but were “too busy” to help them.
To those law firms that insist that everyone work from the office most or all of the time, I say this:
Talented, motivated, and empowered people work well from wherever they are. If you think that your lawyers and law clerks need to be at the office to be micromanaged by you and ensure that they do not slack off, you are either lousy at hiring or hopeless at training, mentoring, supervision, or leadership. Probably all of them.
This article was originally published by Law360 Canada, part of LexisNexis Canada Inc.