Welcome to What Matters — a series of topics that aim to put some of the critical pieces together for lawyers. This month, we explore hybrid working: what we know so far, how we’re practising it, and how these shifts are impacting the legal industry.

As a concept, hybrid working is still relatively new. The pandemic removed cultural and technological barriers, shifting when, where, and how work is done. And now many of us do it every day. It’s a format with many unknowns and as many preferences as people. Zoom out, and we’re all contributing to a global experiment — innovating by doing the same work, just differently, and learning in the process.

We’re curious to understand the future of work in our vertical — and we want to make life better for legal firms and lawyers (our clients). As we reconfigure ways of working, we’re thinking about what matters. What do meaningful productivity measurements look like? And how can we maintain strong team connections when untethered from an office?

Here, we explore hybrid work in the legal realm, and how it’s working for us. Plus, we asked around the (distributed) office and collected some references on how these shifts are impacting the field. You’re welcome.

Are lawyers and legal support suited to WFH?

Remote work arrangements are currently concentrated among knowledge and desk workers. According to the ABS, close to 60% of managers and professionals in August 2023 worked from home regularly, compared with around 22% in other occupations.

Opinions on remote and hybrid work vary significantly, shaped by many factors, motivations, and personal circumstances. When the conversation is split into hard binaries — office vs remote — this limits the possibilities of what the future of work could be. What if hybridity could be implemented as more of a gradient? How might workplace policies enable flexibility and agency at an individual level?

Most lawyers are theoretically compatible with remote work; however, the traditional stereotype of legal teams being chained to their desks doing a lot of late-night reading and referencing doesn’t evaporate with a change of “scenery”. Many law firms are formalising flexible and hybrid working policies, resulting in positive outcomes for well-being, job satisfaction, and productivity.

Is it good for productivity?

The changing nature of workplaces and workplace policies has a fundamental impact on companies and individuals. In a realm of six-minute units, one thorny question is whether remote work is being done effectively. There is no shortage of productivity (and productivity-monitoring) tools, from Zoom for formal meetings and cloud platforms to huddle and chat, to time trackers for performance. Yet no productivity tool has managed to answer why some people perform better than others, regardless of where the work happens. It will always be case-by-case because workers are humans, not robots.

As remote work’s challenges and benefits become clearer, we’re learning there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to working well from home. Companies are continuously testing emerging tech to find the best tools to deliver training remotely, enable on-demand learning, and support hybrid collaboration. Meanwhile, employees are negotiating less visible work-life boundaries and discovering their preferences when prescribed frameworks dissolve.

Despite the experimental nature, many people really like working from home, with 98% wanting to work remotely at least part of the week. While some data shows that digital productivity monitoring can boost performance, some of this tech (and the distrust) does more harm than good. Plus, the less-productive risk feels low for the likes of lawyers, architects, and entrepreneurs — all suckers for overtime (and pain).

What matters (from our perspective)

At Sky Discovery, we’ve supported a hybrid working structure since the start. As a team of knowledge workers, we find we’re well-suited to these emerging work formats. Perhaps one of the benefits of being a young company is that we didn’t have an existing legacy or “baggage” to unpack when deciding on this structure. So we took a curious, open-minded deep dive into this new way of working. Here’s what we’ve learned so far.

Flexibility and agency

While hybrid and remote working has always been part of Sky Discovery, it is informed by a broader principle of creating a great place to work. Our perspective on how things “should be” isn’t fixed. Change is inevitable. So, our operating model is designed to support ways of working that get our jobs done efficiently, effectively, and securely. Currently, this means some people choose to work from the office almost full-time, and others work from home most of the week. We are aware that being inflexible could impact our competitiveness in attracting and retaining talent, so we create space to adapt to evolving conditions and desires.

Human-scale productivity

At this stage in our journey, we’re finding flexible work arrangements empower our teams to work how it suits them — and deliver results. This isn’t to say it’s a perfect system and meetings never crackle and glitch, but it allows our team to self-determine what great work looks like for them. Some of our team members feel more productive in the office, and some prefer to delineate their place of work and home. Like many companies, our office overheads have been reduced, but people will always have the option to work from one of our spaces. By tapping into co-working facilities, we’re able to redirect the money saved towards more intentional in-person events with our team and clients.

Keeping connected

With a more distributed team working in and out of the office on their own schedules, it can be difficult to establish and maintain meaningful relationships among colleagues, old and new. To address this, we encourage leaders within each office to regularly bring their teams together to ensure essential connections despite the absence of a water cooler. We’re finding certain tasks are still most effective when everyone’s in a physical room. And we are exploring more ideas to ensure our team and clients can connect more often in person, both inside and outside of work.

Work-life balance

In the past few years, many staff have experienced or will experience changes in their personal circumstances, such as additions to the family, interstate moves, and family or personal illness. Our model enables our team to navigate these circumstances more flexibly, allowing them to attend to their personal needs parallel to fulfilling commitments to clients and colleagues. We find honest, open dialogue is key to making this work. Our people matter. And if we can build a healthy, elastic workplace culture that means, together, we can achieve our mission of making life easier for lawyers.

Inclusive technologies

As champions of technology-assisted work practices, we are committed to adapting, learning, and keeping our eyes open to new ways of working and the benefits they bring to our team and clients. We remain hyper-aware of the impact of increased technology use on feelings of isolation and disconnection from the people behind the work. So we adopt technologies that enhance our processes and communication, and rethink them if the workflow feels clunky or limiting.

People enjoy and do their best work when they feel included, valued, and equal — when they feel like they belong. To attract the best talent and retain a great team, we put trust in our employees and design how work is done around this foundational value, and as a result, we see the benefits from both engagement and performance outcome perspectives. This is the company we want to create. Thankfully, we haven’t felt the need to implement keystroke tracking, yet 🤞

References

To help bring to light some of the perspectives in this ongoing debate, we have gathered some insights and resources that explore, in a constructive way, the ongoing discussion around hybrid work.

Atlassian Work Futurist, Dom Price, regularly posts insights on creating enjoyable work environments. Atlassian's Team Anywhere concept is publicly available.

Lawyers Weekly recently interviewed several Australian law firms to gain insights on what has informed the current approaches to remote and hybrid working for Lander & Rogers, Dentons, Hamilton Locke, Mills Oakley, Gadens and more.

The College of Law has shared insights from law firms and industry leaders on building effective and functional hybrid working spaces and practices.

Human Leaders founders, Alexis Zahner and Sally Clarke advise focusing on autonomy and connectedness to build a better company culture.

What Matters is a bi-monthly newsletter providing helpful insights and ways to win for lawyers and their teams. We believe it’s one email worth reading — and we’ll never send more than six (6) per year. In our forthcoming editions, we will explore burnout 🥵 and AI 🤖 (no, not together). See you in two (2) months 👋