Flexible working - happy staff, happy clients…
At Kelly Family Law, we operate a flexible working policy for all of our staff. Broadly speaking, rather than the traditional “9 to 5, Monday to Friday” working hours, our team are free to choose their own working pattern.
In order for this to be successful, we need to balance client service and employee wellbeing. As a new (6 month old) firm, we are still building our reputation and the best way to do this (and differentiate ourselves from our competitors) is by providing first-class service to our clients. The reality of family law is that it can be difficult for clients to find a suitable time or a place to speak with their lawyers (often about very sensitive or delicate matters as they are usually at work or caring for children between 9 and 5). We understand this, and this is why we can make ourselves available for calls in the evenings and at weekends, where this is most convenient for our clients.
Conversely, too many evening and weekend appointments are not in the firm’s best interests – as employee work-life balance needs to be maintained. How we make this work is by regular check-ins and communication and by trusting our employees to manage this themselves (our default response to any request to change hours or days is ‘yes’ unless there is a good reason). If one of our employees wants to go to the gym, spend time with their children or walk the dog for an hour or two during the day, we encourage this.
How do you make flexible working work in practice?
There are certain practicalities which need to be taken into account. Most importantly, we need the right people to make this work. At KFL we are lucky to have a great team who buy into the culture that we are building and are committed to excellent client service. Secondly, we want any client calling us to always speak to a person (rather than an answering machine) so we use an outsourced answering service for this. Thirdly, diary management – it is key to our approach that everyone keeps their diary up to date as to when they are and aren’t available for appointments, in case clients call. Lastly, to manage performance, we keep our focus on outputs (both quality and timeliness), not time spent sitting at a desk. If someone gets a full day’s worth of work done accurately and well in 4 or 5 hours, as far as we are concerned, they’ve earned the rest of the day off!
We find that our employees are motivated and perform best when treated like adults and trusted and empowered to choose the working patterns that work best for them. If we look after them, they will look after our clients.
If you are interested in chatting about a more flexible approach to working patterns – contact us.
