Lawyers spend 10 to 15 years working long hours aspiring to achieve partner or principal status in a law firm. Getting there is not as simple as working hard and it will happen. It involves building technical and marketing skills and financial acumen.

Traditionally, the perfect partner worked hard, delegated ruthlessly and was out in the market feeding the firm. Leadership in the legal profession was measured and remunerated by revenue coming through the door. Today’s legal leaders need to learn to lead in a manner that protects their team, ensures they are safe and creates a learning environment built around reward and recognition.

Is it important that we have a psychologically safe and healthy environment? The answer is yes.

The ‘why’ behind psychologically safe workplaces

Psychological health and safety is required by law, including soon to be mandated regulations and a code of practice in Victoria, with real consequences for non-compliance. There is also evidence which unequivocally shows that workplaces free from psychosocial hazards are more productive, attract and retain talent, and bolster profitability.

And, ethically, subjecting individuals to a harmful workplace environment is morally reprehensible.

Yet, creating psychological health and safety remains challenging and elusive in the legal workplace. Among the primary obstacles is the fact that legal workplaces are often “muscular” environments that can foster culture that celebrates toughness, resilience and pursuit of legal success above all else.

Legal success partly hinges on achieving significant wins but is ultimately measured by the fees generated.

Although performance reviews are typically regular, structured and well-designed, “soft metrics” hold little significance compared to financial success. “Rain makers” are exceedingly rare, highly valued and too often a protected species.

Remuneration for senior associates and above is chiefly influenced by the fees they generate individually and through referred work. This financial aspect continues into partnership, where compensation hinges on the fees brought into the firm and the work leveraged by subordinate lawyers.

Beyond financial imperative

How partners lead, behave and engage internally is rarely, if ever, a weighed factor in remuneration decisions.

This is contrary to most business practices, where one element or the gateway to a short-term incentive is the leader’s behaviour and commitment to values and rules. What you reward is what you get is a popular but true aphorism.

There is currently no proper measurement of psychosocial hazards and governance structure to ensure these hazards are identified and assessed for risk, and controls put in place to eliminate and manage them.

What is not measured is not acted on until there is substantial breach requiring intervention – and that is too late because the damage is done. Even if a firm seeks to reward leadership around psychosocial hazards, there is often no objective data that makes it a reliable and trusted process.

Another complication stems from the fact that psychosocial hazards are fluid, not binary like physical hazards. In other words, they are inclined to clump into groups, such as lack of certainty, work volume and lack of reward and recognition in a leader’s style.

Unlike physical hazards, such as a computer cable presenting a tripping hazard, these are often unconscious behaviours. And, in a setting where individual resilience is the gold standard, they are not identified, but accepted as part of the job.

The burden of job design to prevent psychosocial hazards falls squarely on the shoulders of partners who are delivering and delegating work. They are already stretched to their full bandwidth. Where do they get the time, skill, resources and incentive to address the hazards in how they design the work distribution beneath them?

In law firms, partners are the fuel for the engine. Every cent the firm earns is generated by them. How can you reprogram an acquired learning and set of behaviours when the reward system doesn’t recognise the new needs?

Key knowledge for senior leaders

With the very foundations of how law is practised stacked up against it, building a psychologically safe and healthy workplace is not an easy task. It includes overcoming factors like workloads, leverage, the demands of third parties like courts and other lawyers, the nature of deliberate conflict that underpins the common law world, and the focus on already very busy leaders to change what they are doing, adapt, build, grow and be different.

The steps below, presented in chronological order, permit a safe, graduated and predictable change process that can be embedded and that is legally safe and effective.

• Educate senior leadership on the legal reasons, including the regulators’ desire to prosecute more aggressively business, officers and employees, and the courts’ willingness to impose more condign sentencing.
• Develop a deliberate governance structure that captures evidence of hazards, assesses risks and implements controls to eliminate psychosocial hazards – the absence of such exposing both the firm and the officers to liability. This is particularly the case with the new safety regulations and code, expected to become law later in 2025, imposing a positive duty on law firms.
• Senior leadership needs to understand the reputational harm of failure and the evidence-based business case for embedding psychological health and safety in the workplace.

Tools to build a psychologically safe and healthy workplace

Once the senior leadership team has committed to introducing a system and methodology to eliminate psychosocial hazards, the next steps are to create the first brush of reliable evidence. This can come from already existing sources:

• past surveys
• human resources records (particularly structured exit interviews and performance and conduct issues)
• structured performance reviews.

New survey

In addition to the above, firms should consider introducing a short six to seven question survey to identify key hazards around work design, differences in the way people are treated based on their gender and sense of safety at work.

This minimum viable product of evidence around psychosocial hazards can be enriched through focus groups in areas of concern and individual interviews.

Reporting tools

The evidence of hazards should be risk assessed, control developed and then formulated into a report for the executive to approve and action. High-risk items should be acted on immediately.

Various tools, such as the newly introduced PHReD-T tool,¹ can aid in identifying psychosocial hazards within the workplace and offer strategies for effectively planning, implementing and evaluating work redesign initiatives aimed at mitigating risks.

Policies and leadership

The performance and remuneration policy and process will need review to create a balanced scorecard of behaviours and attributes that weigh the management of psychosocial hazards as a “money matter” for remuneration outcomes.

Education and support must be allocated for leaders to meet these obligations, as well as sufficient people resources to execute their obligations around psychosocial hazards to start their journey of change to become better leaders.

This process must be slow and deliberate, requiring ample resources and support. Leaders are the backbone of the business, crucial for its success, and need resources, opportunities and time to adapt. Consequently, any changes in compensation and performance should be gradual, supported by resources to facilitate this evolution.

Progress, not perfection

Educating the workforce and implementing a straightforward evidence collection method at the outset, which gradually evolves into a more sophisticated approach, is essential.

Recognising the necessity of data collection and its benefits for all within the firm is paramount. Given some lawyers’ aversion to administrative tasks, it is crucial not to pursue a perfect solution immediately, as it may deter participation. Instead, take incremental steps.

Training should focus on rejecting severe psychosocial hazards such as sexual harassment and bullying unequivocally. Additionally, introduce a “STOP, REFLECT then ACT” approach to work distribution, ensuring leaders assess workflow and delegate tasks fairly and transparently to capable individuals. Addressing these high-risk psychosocial hazards is a simple, cost-effective and impactful starting point.

Build on foundations

The next step is to set up regular team and individual meetings around workflow, capability and capacity, and to teach leaders to build relationships of trust to encourage employees to be open when they are failing, fragile and need support.

Firms should establish structured evidence collection, employee knowledge and accountability around psychosocial hazard management. Over a three to five year period, move away from the traditional remuneration and performance pathway to a balanced scorecard that weights appropriate behaviours and builds into remuneration calculation the expected leadership and like behaviours critical for the elimination of psychosocial hazards.

Evaluate and evolve

As part of the change process, firms should establish structured re-evaluation processes to constantly improve the strategy and how it operates.

Regularly communicate internally, and, as you breed success, communicate externally about what you are doing, how it works, why it is important and success metrics.

The best strategy: what is good work redesign?

Effective interventions for managing psychosocial risk in the workplace prioritise prevention by addressing the root causes of harm rather than reacting post-incident, in line with established Work Health and Safety frameworks.

These interventions, collectively termed “work redesign,” focus on modifying work tasks, methods, equipment, workflows and relationships to manage organisational risk. The key considerations for successful work redesign include:

• understanding the capabilities, skills, demographics and physical, emotional and mental capacities of the workforce
• evaluating the nature of tasks, including their physical and emotional demands, complexity, variety, frequency and repetition
• assessing organisational processes and systems such as structure, communication, support, procedures, workflows, values, culture and professional development opportunities
• addressing the physical work environment, including factors like buildings, lighting, noise and temperature, with a focus on ergonomics
• providing appropriate equipment, resources, materials and training to support workers in their tasks.²

Given that some work redesign strategies may take time to fully implement, exploring interim solutions that effectively reduce psychosocial risks is advisable. These solutions need not be elaborate, but should be robust, well-considered, realistic and likely to improve psychological health and safety outcomes.

Consulting

In developing strategy, consulting with key stakeholders is crucial to consider their influence and how they will be impacted by potential changes. Stakeholders include employees, managers, contractors, work health and safety committees and wellbeing champions.

Engaging in consultative discussions not only cultivates a collaborative organisational culture, but helps to identify implementation issues and alternative work design strategies to mitigate psychosocial risks.

For example, you may propose a strategy to reduce emotional demands from the nature and content of file work by rotating workers off a particular matter, but this may not be immediately feasible due to availability constraints and consideration of others’ workloads.

Implementing

Once you have determined the best intervention to use for the work scenario, it is necessary to design a plan for implementation. This needs to consider the specific organisational context, including any factors unique to the organisation that may affect successful implementation such as the organisational structure, work and safety culture and staffing numbers.

Being able to understand why the proposed change will likely reduce the psychosocial risk and how that will occur is an essential part of implementation. This “change logic” or “theory of change” (explaining the why and how) helps to cement the rationale for implementing the change, for yourself, but for all those who will be affected by the change.³ A well-considered change logic statement increases the chance of success for implementing the plan by providing:

• a strong foundation for evaluating any deviations from the intended plan over time and their effects
• rationale for proposed changes when communicating with stakeholders and securing their support.

Although outcomes of implementing the intervention are evaluated at a later stage, it is essential that evaluation is considered when planning the intervention strategy. This is because some of the data needs to be collected before and during implementation and consideration may also need to be given to integrating evaluation tools such as pulse checks, demographic surveys and focus groups to assess baseline for reliable data. Some of this data may come from what was collected when assessing risk, but there will be additional pieces.⁴ 

Evaluating

How do you know if an intervention is effective? The adage “what is measured is treasured” holds true in this case.

Post-intervention assessment is essential to gauge efficacy, examine if goals have been met and if the strategy could be applied elsewhere. Utilising a change logic statement helps to identify success factors and necessary conditions.

Barriers to implementation, like poor consultation and communication, lack of support or resources, may hinder success. Process evaluation delves deeper, identifying reasons for success or failure, highlighting barriers and facilitators such as effective communication or supportive leadership.

Monitoring

Regular monitoring and review of the strategy is crucial to ensure its continued alignment with the evolving needs of the workplace.

Rather than waiting for an incident to occur, proactive review entails consistently assessing the effectiveness of the strategy in addressing psychosocial risks and making necessary adjustments.

This proactive approach involves ongoing data collection, analysis of trends and soliciting feedback from stakeholders to identify emerging issues or areas for improvement. By staying ahead of potential problems, organisations can adapt their strategies in a timely manner, maximising their effectiveness in promoting psychological health and safety in the workplace.

This next frontier is laser-focused on optimising a system based on “practice”, where measurement is embedded into the process and decisions based on the data.

A rocket ship to the moon must constantly course-correct on its journey upwards. Leadership should similarly view this change process as longitudinal and iterative, with an emphasis on governance to steward the ship to safety.