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‘A 360 Degree Review: Flexible Work Practices’

Confronting myths and realities in the legal profession.

Speech by Pru Goward, Sex Discrimination Commissioner at Victorian Women Lawyers, Level 2 RACV 501 Bourke St Melbourne, Friday 11 November.

Acknowledgements

Thank you so much for inviting me to be part of this launch today.   And what a great effort it has been on the part of the Committee- busy people with never enough time, let’s not ask them how their work-life balance has been over the past two years as they have worked their way through this.

Congratulations on such an important piece of research, and to the Foundation for having the confidence and commitment to back Victorian Women Lawyers to do this important work.

I am not sure whether the research set out to prove these myths were really myths or whether you were genuinely surprised by the findings.   The work has immediately identified two which crucial in the work-family debate.

The first myth is that people have to be present twenty four hours a day, seven days a week because that is what clients want.  

I have to say I have always wondered when clients ate or slept or took time off for this to be the case, but significantly, the clients surveyed confirmed their acceptance of flexibilities, their capacity to work around them and that they saw flexibility as preferable to losing continuity of contact with a professional who was familiar with their case.

Of course they need reassurance about billable hours, but that is an issue of transparency more than anything else.

Perhaps they were censoring themselves.   Perhaps they felt they had to say these things when Victorian Women Lawyers started asking the questions, but perhaps they might also have felt it was their chance to set the record straight.   Clients get a very bad press in the work and family debate.

Having gone around Australia listening to employers explaining to me that they wanted to provide flexibilities but their big bad clients wouldn’t let them, I found this particular finding especially heartening.

Ditto the acceptance by co-workers, who unexpectedly were also comfortable working with part timers and others whose hours at work were more varied than their own.   The significant proviso they placed on their acceptance of flexible work colleagues was their need for supervisors to recognise the efforts they made to ensure these flexibilities worked for the firm and their frequent disappointment at the lack of information flow about what was expected of everyone concerned.

They didn’t like having to tell lies either. Again it is frequently claimed that co workers resent these flexibilities enjoyed by parents and again, frequently used by managers to argue the case against their introduction.

It strikes me in a profession as rigorous as the law, it is particularly concerning that law firms proceed on the basis of assertion or assumption, not fact, with no thought of the need to test the evidence in order to confirm whether or not their reasons for refusing to provide family-friendly working conditions would, as it were, stand up in court.

It suggests that law firm partners, in common with leaders in other professions and industries, operate very much on the basis of gut-instinct, guessing at the reasons instead of testing for the reasons.   Yet modern management is very much evidence-driven; people management needs to be every bit as rigorous as financial management.  

Let’s hope that with such excellent qualitative research now available, law firms- and for that matter, other types of firms- may get the hint.  

Perhaps they will either do some in-house research of their own or make a decision to adopt a new gut-instinct this time, informed by this research instead of their own assumptions and uninformed prejudice.  

Even if firms do not actually broaden the availability of family flexibilities, the evidence from co-workers demonstrates they have to be a whole lot more communicative about staff terms and conditions for the existing ones, and certainly more grateful to those staff who go the extra metres to make up for any shortcomings, the sticky-tape that holds the flexible workplace together.

But perhaps I should not be so optimistic.  

Because it should not have needed a survey by a group of concerned volunteers to sort myth from reality.  

Running a law firm is big business, the investment in staff is considerable; people easily make up the most significant cost of running a law firm.  

In an age where there are now more women law graduates than men, and where so many of them ask for work conditions which enable them to also be responsible and engaged parents, you might have thought basic financial management concerns could have driven these sorts of inquiries within firms themselves.

That it has not, that instead either parents are denied these flexibilities or essentially demoted if they take them up, that co workers have to lie to clients and are frequently in the dark themselves about the flexible worker’s arrangements, suggests many managers are more comfortable with their own presumptions than with reality.  

What a great shame, especially in such a people- competitive profession.  

But it goes further than this.   It tells us how resistant culture is to change, how we might don’t mind living on our prejudices instead of our wits, because that’s really where we are comfortable.  

It tells us something else too, almost as depressing. If this is how hard it is at the top of the tree in law firms, where keeping the best people really counts, no wonder it is proving so hard to achieve cultural change in other parts of the Australian work place where managing these issues is less critical.

Of course law firms are frequently not managed by managers, but by lawyers, who happen to have management as part of their partnership responsibilities.

If the partners in law firms are at all comparable with partners in other parts of professional services sector then I would have a guess and say that most partners are still men with wives or consorts at home, full time care givers and primary parents.

A law partner’s working hours and own ambition have frequently dictated this course.   After all they do call law firms the new salt mines.

It must be difficult for people who have never had to juggle their work and family responsibilities in quite the same way as women or men with working partners, to understand or perhaps even sympathise with the plight of the young parent up and comer.  

If it is not something we see as possible or desirable for ourselves, understandably we are probably less sympathetic to countenancing its possibilities for others.

Which is not a plea for partners’ wives to go out to work, but rather a reminder again that we tend to judge other people’s lives by our own, a dangerous assumption indeed when we are managing a multi million dollar business.

Let me make one more observation about the results of this survey, this time about the career outcomes for the young professional working parents.

The research findings establish that 100% of managers and firm partners believed it was possible for staff to work flexibly and have a career, even though they appear to be the most significant obstacle to this actually happening.  

Co-workers and flexible workers themselves take a much dimmer view of it.   Around 2/3s of these flexible workers are dissatisfied with the negative impact it has on their career and less than a half agree its possible to work flexibly and have a career.

This is more the case in private law firms.  

Co workers by and large agree with them.  

And perhaps this is because the same people who believe it is fine in theory to work flexibly and progress up the ladder suspect people who want to work flexibly are less ambitious than their full timers.

Again, maybe because they themselves weren’t flexible workers.

Well let’s get with the programme.  

Working flexibly has to be the future of work in a world where people are expected to work more, not less, both to save for their own (extended) old age and to stave off the day when they must beginning living off their life savings.

It will increasingly not be just about women having children or sensitive new age dads from Generation Y, it will be about middle-aged workers needing to care for parents as well as to work and about still older workers looking for a slightly less intense working life down in the salt mines, as they seek to do the things they have always wanted to do while they still have their health and energy.

This research could not have come at a better time.   No body now has any excuse. They just have to do it.

I have pleasure in launching the report, A 360 degree review; flexible work practices, confronting myths and realities in the legal profession.

Last
6 December 2005 updated