Making law firms psychologically safe workplaces will require sacrificing some productivity while leaders “down tools” to build self-awareness around whether they are delegating work safely, a senior lawyer says.

Andrew Douglas, FCW Lawyers’ managing principal, tells OHS Alert there is a case for tweaking the renumeration of law firm partners to link it to behaviours and cultural drivers rather than over-focusing on productivity.

Douglas and Desi Vlahos, CEO of Wellceum and senior lecturer at the Australian College of Applied Professions, co-authored a feature in this month’s Law Institute Journal on how law firm leaders can create psychological safe and healthy workplaces.

In the article, they say the “burden of job design to prevent psychosocial hazards falls squarely on the shoulders of partners who are delivering and delegating work”.

But they say firms’ reward systems often don’t recognise the need for this, and partners are not provided with the “time, skill, resources and incentive to address the hazards in how they design the work distribution beneath them”.

Douglas says closing this gap will require firms to question why they remunerate productivity so that it becomes the sole focus of all concerned.

“You have to get to a stage where there are gateways towards getting that remuneration which relate to cultural drivers within the organisation and their good behaviour, which means trying not to psychologically harm people,” he says.

Douglas says firms need to teach leaders to be aware of their strengths and weaknesses and what good leadership looks like. The next step involves “gradually changing and tweaking remuneration” so partners “can’t get the higher remuneration unless [they] behave in a particular way, unless [they] are self-aware, and unless the teams are saying ‘this is the person I need to work with'”.

Firms also need to build a “measurement and evidence structure” to objectively assess workers’ good behaviours.

“The transition stage means you are going to lose a period of time of productivity while people learn,” Douglas says.

But the investment is “not a big one”, and firms can buy it back in outcomes. “If you do all those things, you will get higher productivity out of your lawyers, you will get better realisation rates… and you’re going to get a better client experience,” he says.

Vlahos says that building a psychologically safe workplace should be factored into a firm’s overall strategy and “carefully crafted into the role of the leader”, including by providing them with time to understand their role and how to manage effectively.

Firms should understand the goals they’re seeking to achieve, implement interventions to achieve these, and measure results and “course correcting” to hit the desired outcomes, she says.

Leadership not an inherent skill

Douglas says that crucial to building a psychologically safe environment is getting leaders to be self-aware, and able to understand, when they’re delegating work, whether workers have the capability, capacity and skills to do it and that it is organised in a way they can “execute upon”.

While lawyers by way of their profession are well-informed about WHS and risk, the drive for productivity and revenue means hazards are often spoken about but not understood, he says.

One obstacle to a psychologically safe workplace is that firm leaders are often not trained in leadership, and become leaders because they generate the highest revenues rather than because they are good leaders, he says.

Another obstacle is the “reverse understanding” of where psychosocial hazards sit in the workplace.

Lawyers are taken to be resilient, have the “right mindset” for the work, and be accountable for managing the work that flows toward them, Douglas says.

But this is “nonsense”. The personalities of their leaders determine the sorts of psychological hazards workers are potentially exposed to, he says.

For example, one leader who is inclined to trust workers to do their jobs might cause psychological injuries by failing to provide workers with clarity or precision about what needs to be performed and when it needs to be done by. Another might break a worker by raising their voice and assigning them too much work without understanding that they are already fully loaded.

Leaders need to understand there are disciplines around leadership, Douglas says.

“Leadership is not something which is natural. Despite what people think, you’re not inherently a good leader. It is a very deliberate process, leading.”

Originally published in the OHS Alert on Tuesday 13th August 2024.

Author:
Lu Sun
OHS Alert
www.ohsalert.com.au