Doing Office Time

Law firms are steadily increasing the number of mandatory days in the office for employees. While some demand three days in person, others require four. Bloomberg Law recently reported on this trend in an article entitled “Weil Joins Firms Forcing Lawyers Into Office Four Days a Week.” The article states: “Weil, Gotshal & Manges is the latest major law firm to limit employees’ remote work, telling lawyers and staff to hit the office at least four days per week.”

Two things in this article immediately jumped out at me: the word “Forcing” in the headline and the words “at least four days” (emphasis added). The meaning of the word “Forcing” is pretty obvious. In fact, Weil is not alone in this. The article reports that Simpson Thacher and Sidley Austin “have threatened to withhold bonuses for associates who don’t meet minimum attendance requirements.” Forcing, indeed.

The reference to “at least four days” was another tell. Of course, lawyers in large law firms are not working only five days each week. Far too many work six and seven days each week. Given this reality, they will now be given the privilege of working from home on the weekend and, possibly, one other day. Hmmm.

Unfortunately, these demands for in-person office time are increasing across industries beyond legal. Academic researchers in the US and Mexico are tracking work from home patterns around the world. Their data show that while more employers are pushing for a return to the office, many employees are resistant.

One of the biggest challenges to forced in-person time is that people genuinely hate their commutes. They find them to be anxiety-filled and a waste of time. During the pandemic, people were suddenly relieved of the need to commute and discovered a measure of ease in their days. Admittedly, because law firms remained remarkably busy, many lawyers spent their “commuting time” working. However, the lucky ones were able to trade those hours for a bit more flexibility during the day. This was a significant benefit.

So why make the decision for more office time? According to the recent announcement from Ropes & Gray, their culture, teamwork, and professional development require “in-person collaboration, learning and mentoring.” They go on to state “we need more people together, more often, more consistently.”

In a similar vein, here’s Weil’s perspective:

“Over the past year, we have all seen the many benefits that come with people working regularly in-person—especially with the predictability of knowing people will be in consistently on the same days…. Training for our lawyers at all levels has benefited from the full return, as have mentorship, morale and professional development.”

But how do they know? And who actually benefits?

• What is the benefit of “the predictability of knowing people will be in consistently on the same days”?
  • So that you can hold more productive in-person meetings? If a firm is committed to greater productivity, then surely this means its employees have been trained to waste less time and gain more utility from meetings — whether in-person or virtually. If a firm hasn’t done this, then the focus on predictability of presence is mainly about relieving senior people of the burden of planning.
  • So you can physically monitor them? This says a lot about hiring and management practices. If you hire the right people and give them clear directions regarding necessary tasks and timelines, the results should speak for themselves. What additional benefit does the physical monitoring provide?
• What about training and professional development? Why can’t training and professional development be offered on specific days when people are invited back to the office for learning sessions accompanied by some thoughtful community-building? Or are training and professional development more ad hoc rather than well-planned? If so, how are you actually measuring results?
• As for mentorship, are senior people capable of providing mentorship only in person? Mentorship is fundamentally about relationship. If senior people have relationships only with people they can physically meet, then I sincerely feel sorry for them. Some of my dearest friends and colleagues live far from me BUT we make it a priority to be in touch. Why isn’t this the norm in law firms?
• Finally, morale. Please help me with this. What about dragging people into the office against their will improves morale?

All of the so-called benefits of the tougher attendance policy are intangibles that, conveniently, firms are not always good at measuring accurately. So, in the absence of hard data, are firms relying on gut feelings, on perceptions of the “right way” of doing things, on habit? This seems like a shaky basis on which to rest a policy guaranteed to alienate employees.

The pandemic gave us an opportunity to try different ways of working. Despite these changes, most industries reported remarkable levels of productivity throughout that time period. Nonetheless, there are those who pined for the office and are now not satisfied until everyone else is back in the office with them — regardless of the personal preferences of those others or the significant personal price those others have to pay on a daily basis to accommodate the office-dwellers.

Firms should be focused on how to reduce burnout. Adding to the daily stress of their employees is not a recipe for success.

[Photo Credit: Peter Lawrence]