Circa 2010

I know a lot about remote working—a/k/a working from home. That’s because I started doing it in 2010, long before the pandemic. I am blessed with unusual powers of concentration and am an introvert at heart, so the arrangement appealed to me. At the time I started, I had a 4-year old daughter and a one-year old son and was lucky to have a husband who was staying at home with them while I worked.

Working from home allowed me to work for one of the best class action firms in the country without requiring them to open a high-cost office in the Washington, D.C. area, where I had just moved. I could be somewhat more present in my kids’ lives and still do work at the highest level. And the firm’s main office was in Seattle, so I didn’t have to start responding to crazy emails until later in the morning, which was pretty great for someone who’s emphatically not a morning person.

Sounds like professional heaven, right? Until I tell you that every time I planned to be on a conference call (Zoom wasn’t around back then), I had to tell my husband to take the kids to the basement/outside/to a surprise trip to McDonald’s, tape over my doorbell with a sign that said “DO NOT RING!”, and either pray that UPS wouldn’t deliver a package or have my husband also take our two dogs with our two kids. And if the firm’s managing partner decided to call me without giving me any notice (fortunately he wasn’t much for the phone), I ran outside to take the call, even if it was 20 degrees. My family and friends all knew they should not stop by during the day. But if anyone did, they would have seen that I was never wearing my PJs, always looked professional, and had done my make-up. I did not “lunch” with anyone. I never ran errands during the day. And, contrary to what many of my colleagues joked, I certainly was not sneaking in loads of laundry in my spare time.

I was absolutely terrified someone would think I was being unprofessional, and I thought allowing anyone to see the gymnastics of my personal life was unprofessional.

So I made up for my lack of “professionalism” by working as hard as I could. While as I mentioned I’m not a morning person, I worked pretty much without pause until dinnertime, took a brief break, and then worked all through the evening, usually until well after midnight. If I needed equipment to make my life easier, like a high-speed printer or a speakerphone (this is 2010, mind you), I paid for it myself. No one at my firm ever told me that I had to do any of this: I just had this idea that I owed it to them because they were allowing me the privilege of working from home.

Reading all of this with 2023 eyes, my story—even though one of privilege in many ways— sounds absolutely insane. During the pandemic I jumped on Zooms where not a single person looked “professional.” None of us had gotten a haircut for months. Children, pets, spouses, Amazon deliveries, and everything else about ordinary life intruded. No one was ashamed of those interruptions; in fact, they often provided much-need humor during a time that really wasn’t that much fun. My colleagues learned when my kids had (remote) band class, because they’d routinely hear a trumpet or saxophone in the background of our calls. Yet despite this messiness, the practice of law went on.

And yet, in reading articles [paywall] about law firms demanding that attorneys return to the office fulltime, maybe we haven’t come as far as we think.

What We Get—and Lose—From Working from Home

The advantages of allowing employees to work from home are now well-documented. Remote employees are more productive, in part because they save significant amounts of time when they don’t have to commute. Before the pandemic lawyers would often express to me that remote work could never function properly because you couldn’t trust people to work outside the eyes of a supervisor. Multiple studies have since proven that false.

Remote work is particularly advantageous for women. In addition to the fact that we often have the caregiving responsibilities that require flexibility, working from home mitigates the effects of a toxic workplace. Women even report experiencing less sexual harassment when they work from home. According to a recent survey of over 20,000 female employees, over the past three years approximately 5% of women who worked remotely reported instances of sexual harassment compared with 12% of in-person women workers.

Yet despite those advantages, most lawyers can’t get the most out of their jobs if they work from home all the time. Even in 2010, I recognized that there were things I was missing by virtue of working from home. I didn’t have any water cooler camaraderie; I often missed out on office politics and the latest gossip; and mentoring was challenging. I wasn’t always visible to others in my firm.

There are also things about practicing law that need to be done in-person. You’re not going to get the benefits of brainstorming over a Zoom call. You certainly can’t prepare for trial that way. And on a human level, you’re unlikely to get the true scoop on how members of your team are doing—professionally or personally—over the phone, no matter how good you are about regular check-ins.

How to Make Hybrid Work

Given that there are pros and cons in both working from home and working in the office, most experts have concluded that so-called hybrid workplaces are the wave of the future. The problem is that “hybrid” means different things to different people and, if not implemented thoughtfully, so-called hybrid work can reinforce the problems of more traditional working environments.

In my view, the best mind on this issue (and many other work-related issues) is Wharton’s Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist. Since the pandemic, he’s had a lot to say about leaders who insist that people come back into the office full time. (You should definitely follow him on LinkedIn to get regular insights about “how to make work not suck,” as he says.)

In one of his many discussions on the subject, he spoke to Nick Bloom, an economist from Stanford University who, with colleagues, studied remote and hybrid work for years. The discussion showed that having a functioning hybrid workplace requires several things:

1. Everyone in the office (or in a given practice area/work group/team, etc.) comes to work on the same days. It simply makes no sense to require everyone to work two days of the week if everyone comes in at different times: that just means you’re asking people to come into the office a certain number of days just for the sake of doing it. In addition, requiring everyone to come in on the same days reduces what Dr. Bloom calls “proximity bias”—the tendency of managers to reward the people they see in person. Unsurprisingly, proximity bias most often benefits men. Workplaces don’t have a truly hybrid workplace if everyone privileged enough to work in the office 5-days a week without significant challenge comes in every day, and only those with such challenges abide by the policy.

2. Work that needs the office should be done there; work that doesn’t should be done at home. We have to be deliberate about what office days will be used for: when employers ask people to come into the office, it should be to accomplish those things for which days in the office are best suited. Days at home are best for “deep work” that requires prolonged periods of concentration. In contrast, days in the office are best for brainstorming, status updates, fostering teamwork, and building a culture. It’s ridiculous to demand that people come into the office a certain number of days a week to jump on Zoom calls.

3. Management must walk the walk. Supervisors must not only work from home and come into the office on the days everyone else does (absent normal variances like travel or illness), but also must support a hybrid work policy in what they say. If on the days you come into the office you overhear a manager bitching about how it sucks to work from home “to accommodate all the moms,” it’s easy to see how that policy—and that employer—will have a short life.

4. Revisit—regularly—whether a hybrid work arrangement is working or not. And build in flexibility to the arrangement. Perhaps everyone comes into the office more frequently during the spring and fall than the summer and winter. Perhaps certain groups come in more often as they prepare for a hearing or trial, or to close a major deal. The point is to repeatedly ask whether the policy is accomplishing its underlying goals, and to do that re-examination with facts. This allows an employer to make decisions based on data rather than suppositions and prejudices. (If you can’t get people to be straight with you about how things are going, anonymous surveys work in larger offices.)

Closing Thoughts

There is no reason that legal employers should refuse to adopt hybrid work policies. In doing so they acknowledge that attorneys are adults with lives and interests separate from the workplace. Back in 2010 it was silly for me to hide that I had young kids and pets when I was getting the work done. My idea of “professionalism” was framed by men who had completely different lives from me.

I always used to hear that we shouldn’t allow people to work from home because they would take advantage of it, but if you don’t trust someone enough to give them a few days to work from home, you shouldn’t be employing them in the first place. After working in the legal profession for over 30 years, I can’t think of a single good employee who became a bad one because she started working from home. But I can think of many workplaces that were terrible places to work because the attitudes that underlie the “come back to the office or be fired” attitudes were allowed to persist.

Workplace culture is important, and I understand that law firms and other legal employers are concerned about the loss of it when people work some of their days from home. But if a culture can only survive if people see each other five days a week or more, it’s not much of a culture.

Finally, as we discussed in the last newsletter, employees are much less likely to burnout if they have a sense of autonomy, control, and fairness. Hybrid work policies promote all three of these.

No Rants & Raves this week!