In-house teams must drive diversity to recover post-pandemic: report
In-house legal teams will need to focus on five ‘pillars’, which include driving diversity across all dimensions and at all levels, if they are to recover and find new opportunities in a post-pandemic world.
A report from Obelisk Support, a legal services provider founded by former Linklaters lawyer Dana Denis-Smith, has identified five ‘pillars’ for a sustainable in-house team: flexibility; challenging work and career paths; health and wellbeing; diversity and inclusion; and leadership and role models.
“This will require consistent effort, on top of what is already a crowded agenda. However, a failure to take action will lead to in-house teams losing the very people who are best-placed to answer the challenges their businesses face,” said the report.
A commitment to diversity
While in-house legal teams are embracing the opportunity to shape diversity in the profession, by “demanding evidence of change as part of their law firm selection process”, there is certainly more to do, said the report.
Indeed, WIPR recently analysed diversity demands set by some corporates, concluding that while they were a good first step, more companies will need to follow this lead, perhaps with greater ambition.
And, as WIPR reported earlier this month, while 60% of UK lawyers working in-house are women, just 1.5% are disabled, while black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) lawyers are also underrepresented.
In order to build “inclusive cultures that prompt superior performance”, said Obelisk, general counsels need to recruit a diverse team by asking recruiters to introduce people from a range of backgrounds.
Other ideas included celebrating a range of cultural events and championing the work of employee affinity groups, influencing law firm behaviour at the firms you work with and ensuring spend is allocated across firms and other vendors with diverse leadership teams, and influencing policies and practices across your business.
“A survey by PwC found that 61% of women and 49% of men look at the diversity of an organisation’s leadership team when deciding whether to work for them or not, making those companies who don’t focus attention in this area more likely to miss out on talent tomorrow as well as today,” said the report.
A traditional mindset
Within the first pillar of the blueprint—flexibility—Obelisk said that its analysis found that just 17 of the FTSE 100 companies made it clear that specific flexible working practices were available for open roles in their job advertisements.
“Despite the benefits of flexible and remote working, there is still more to be done to change the traditional mindset that often requires employees to be at their desks in an office and overseen by their managers,” added the report.
Obelisk suggested that new metrics are required to measure performance when lawyers are not working in an office environment. With many now working from home amid the pandemic, this is perhaps more pertinent than usual.
General counsel should set measures that focus on output, rather than time-taken. Logging activity metrics alongside quality metrics, such as customer satisfaction scores, can help to analyse and monitor workload.
Attempting to introduce changes in work patterns only through HR policies is likely to have limited success, said Obelisk. “Individuals need to see new behaviours role modelled by senior people within the organisation,” said the report, in outlining the fifth pillar of leadership and role models.
It added: “Without these role models there is likely to be a lack of trust around the acceptability of the new policy. New policies do not necessarily lead to new practices—these have to be enacted by figures.”
An open culture
Under the second pillar, challenging work and career paths, Obelisk noted that mothers who want to return to work after childbirth and maternity leave are another source of potential talent. However, just seven of the FTSE 100 companies appear to offer returnships to legal or associated roles.
Returnships are a form of internship that provide a bridge back into senior roles for professionals who have taken an extended career break.
Finally, Obelisk noted that the legal industry as a whole is waking up to the importance of addressing health and wellbeing issues.
Under the third pillar, health and wellbeing, the report said that even though in-house lawyers are traditionally perceived to have a better work-life balance, “increasing workloads and responsibilities mean that in-house leaders too need to find ways to support their employees”.
Most important, according to the report, is for legal leaders to start by creating an “open culture that supports people’s physical and mental health issues, without prejudice and without discrimination, no matter who they are”.
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