Last week, we talked about “having it all” in the workplace, which really was a discussion about prioritizing what one wants out of work. The week before was about an organization’s culture and fitting into that culture. Both of those columns were about culture with the eye that the culture was already in place and, if not immutable, difficult to change.
For most of us, that’s true. It is hard to change an organization’s culture. It takes intention, action, follow-through, and accountability to make a significant shift in culture. It isn’t impossible, but the organization has to want to change and most importantly, leadership has to demand change. The tough thing about that is that the leadership probably got to where they are through the benefits of the old culture. It takes a sophisticated, mature leader to realize the system that may have brought him his success is not sustainable and needs to change.
We occasionally hear lawyers mention culture when they talk about work. For law firms, it usually includes a culture of “winning” or “success” and occasionally “family” and “work-life balance.” If you’ve only ever worked in a law firm, you may think that’s all there is. And thus, when you try to prioritize what you want out of work, you don’t rank culture highly. Or, when you are looking for a new place of employment, you may rank “work-life balance” at the top of things you are looking for, to the exclusion of other cultural criteria that may actually be more important to you.
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What are those other cultural criteria? Trustworthiness, collaboration, career advancement, and accountability are a few, and they impact how one feels about one’s work enormously. Businesses have evolved with these concepts of business culture and how to improve the business culture to promote productivity and employee engagement for decades. Law firms have, generally speaking, not taken advantage of the decades of learning about these issues by those in business. To be fair, law firms aren’t incentivized to improve employee engagement or reduce waste through improved internal communications. Because of the billable hour, historically there has been no reason to try to reduce the time spent on a matter. And as for employee engagement (or lack thereof), employee discontent can be an easy way to have employees self-select themselves out of the organization.
The billable hour is still king for law firms, and probably will never go away. What will go away is the client’s willingness to pay for waste. You can see this in clients moving from allowing billing increments of 15 minutes, to 6 minutes, to now 3 minutes. It won’t be the clients demanding a reduction in waste, it will be the lawyers who discover they cannot bear the burden of unnecessary waste when they are trying to find ways to be as effective and efficient as possible. When lawyers realize the amount of unbillable time they spend dealing with a dysfunctional culture, like trying to find information that is being hoarded by a colleague, or those desperate moments of daydreaming to escape a job where one does not feel engaged or valued, they will make improving business culture a reality.
Until then, it doesn’t hurt to learn more about what makes a strong business culture. If you search any bookseller, brick and mortar or online, for books about management, productivity, or engagement, you will find the bibles that build the foundation of defining and improving corporate culture and the books that expand on that area of knowledge.
Of course, once lawyers know how to improve the situation, we no longer have an excuse for tolerating the status quo.
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Celeste Harrison Forst has practiced in small and mid-sized firms and is now in-house at a large manufacturing and technology company where she receives daily hugs from her colleagues. You can reach Celeste directly at [email protected].