How To Improve Your Work-Life Balance Within Your Firm
For those working within the legal sector, a healthy work-life balance may seem out of the question. For example, a recent study found that 73% of lawyers report working outside of the normal Monday-Friday work week, often checking their emails or carrying out tasks during their supposedly “free” time. Not only that, but lawyers at large firms work, on average, 66 hours per week.
While many will be happy to consider this part of the package when it comes to working in the legal sector, especially as it tends to indicate that a firm is performing well and receiving a high volume of clients, there are many dangers associated with a poor work-life balance.
For example, over time, a poor work-life balance will impact your employee’s ability to work to a high standard. This is because they’ll likely begin to exhibit the signs of burnout or exhaustion, leading to a loss of productivity and efficiency. This, in turn, can lead to client frustration or complaints.
Furthermore, with wellness becoming a priority for most of the workforce, employees are likely to start leaving your team en masse if they cannot build a healthy work-life balance. In fact, “56% of workers say work-life balance is more important than a higher salary.”
With this in mind, here are some top tips that you can use to improve work-life balance within your firm.
Lead by example. Many employees report feeling “pressured” to work long, unsociable hours because their seniors/bosses are often sat at their desks late into the night. After all, this can seem to set a precedent for everyone else within the company, many of who will fight to be seen as a “team player” by whatever means necessary. As such, one way in which you can improve work/life balance within your law firm is by leading by example!
While you may work overtime occasionally, try to set yourself strict working hours and manage your boundaries accordingly. This will encourage your team to follow suit.
Invest in technology. Investing in technology is another great way to improve work-life balance within your law firm. This is because it can lessen your employee’s workload without lowering your overall output or the number of clients you take on. Fortunately, you have plenty of options to choose from in this regard. For example, you could use AI within your law firm to manage a customer query portal, reducing the number of emails your employees have to send/comb through on a daily basis. Alternatively, you could use these tools to summarize lengthy documents or conduct basic research.
Hire non-legal staff, too. When first starting out, your team likely took on numerous roles at once. For example, the chances are that lawyers spend a lot of time on communication or admin-based tasks, especially during the client onboarding process. While this may not seem to be a major issue, it often means that the work you actually hired them for is being neglected or that they must work later in order to work through their to-do list. As such, you should consider hiring non-legal staff who can take on this work instead, such as an admin assistant.
It’s also important to note that when you ask legal personnel to carry out work they’re not trained to handle, such as accounting tasks, they’ll likely spend hours on tasks that would take professionals just minutes, bringing productivity levels to a halt!
At FinOp Group, we have years of experience in supporting law firm owners to improve their work-life balance through our outsourced accounting services. Get in touch today to find out more!
