Pacesetter Research: Workplace Strategy, Opportunity for the Legal Industry?
Developing and implementing an effective workplace strategy has become increasingly important to some law firms, with Innovators moving further away from traditional models; however, many still struggle to realize all its opportunities and continue to observe from the sidelines cautiously
January 30, 2024 at 11:27 AM
6 minute read
The rapid growth of factories during the Industrial Revolution created a new way of organizing labor for the production of goods. During this time, factories were commonly considered the workplace for employees. The Industrial Revolution drove efficiency, which put an emphasis on process management and data analytics, and those, in turn, drove a professionalization of the workplace that eventually gave rise by the 1950s to the Information Age. As the country focused on technology advancements that facilitated the processing and transmission of information, jobs evolved, and work also began to take place in offices. For the U.S., the 1960s were the early beginnings of the office as a workplace.
Fast forward to March 2020, when the pandemic hit, businesses faced serious challenges that impacted their workforce, operations, and productivity, among other issues, threatening their very survival. The pandemic also changed the perceptions of a work-life balance for many professionals, ultimately changing how we work. The pandemic left no industry immune to its effects and created significant challenges for where and how work was performed, impacting service delivery models. To survive the pandemic, most industries found themselves having to rapidly change their workplace strategy, a new term meant to describe an organization's office occupancy strategy, more specifically, whether employees work in a hybrid, remote, or in-office work structure, to optimize the work environment to support business goals. This instantaneous pivot has caused a conundrum for business leaders today about what the best (in terms of productivity, revenues, risk management, employee retention, regulatory compliant, etc.) office/workplace arrangements might be. Workplace strategy is not one-size-fits-all, and organizations struggle to determine which hybrid, remote, or in-office structure will produce the best business outcomes.
The legal industry is no exception to the challenges brought on by the pandemic. During the pandemic, most firms were forced to temporarily adopt a 100% remote workplace strategy to continue to meet client and business needs. For most firms, this also prompted increased use of technology to support talent with this new way of working reality – - something the legal industry has typically been slower to take advantage of. There was also an increase in demand for legal services during the pandemic as clients struggled with navigating new government regulations. Many firms succeeded in proving they were a much more flexible business than they thought, working remotely to deliver their services. As reported on Law.com, law firms saw a net income growth of 9.9%, and Am Law 50 firms saw a net income growth of 12.7% in 2020. However, gradually over time, now post-pandemic, most law firms have transitioned from a remote workplace strategy to a hybrid workplace strategy, one which many firms have revised multiple times (for example, from three days in-office to now, more commonly, four days in-office), and now most reverting to the traditional 5-day week in-office models. Unfortunately, the reality is that these decisions were more likely based on the preferences of senior executives, rooted in tradition rather than strategic planning and data.
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