How understaffing influence employee satisfaction?
Beekeper and Cargill found that one of the strongest motivators of frontline workers is doing their job well and on time, as well as positive feedback from managers or customers. This does not seem like a revolutionary discovery, obviously we lawyers also love to finish our assignments on time and well. But here’s where research findings get really interesting. More than 90% of frontline workers surveyed by Beekeper and Cargill identified understaffing as their main stressor in the workplace.
One could think that this would be a reason for concern mainly for managers and executives who face trouble allocating work or delivering results. But interestingly, employees are also directly affected by understaffing because increased amount of work means there is a risk they will not reach their main motivator – job done well and on time.
In the era of workforce shortage employees shifted their main concern from “I might lose my job” to “I’m not going to manage to do it all”. Stress caused by increased workload will drive burnouts or motivate to seek another job.
Understaffing in law firms
Does the above relate to law firms? Well, how often do we work on our assignments until the last minute or stay after hours to finish all of the work on time? How often do we need to make late changes or skip quality control altogether? And lastly, how often do we feel stress as a result of it? Having too much work to fit it in an 8–10-hour workday is an established pattern in our profession (I didn’t even dare to leave just the ‘8’ in that sentence).
I am confident that if surveyed, lawyers would put overworking at the top of the stressors’ list as well. Quite like the frontline workers, we are working longer than we should, it is our main stressor and it prevents us to finish our work well and on time in a healthy manner (which causes even more stress).
This problem was already visible in the past, but back then one lawyer was quickly changed for the next one. Now this is no longer possible for most firms or departments as both number and preferences of lawyers changed. When faced with overworking, lawyers who know they won’t have a problem finding a new job will seek a place that offers them better organisation of work. Please note – I don’t mean less work, but work better organised.
So what should we do to find and fight understaffing? And more importantly, is understaffing the real problem?
How to check if your staffing is right?
The problem of understaffing is fairly easy to spot in frontline businesses – you see right away that you don’t have enough FTE’s to operate the machinery or production line in full planned capacity. In law firms the problem is not so visible. We don’t have a production line, the output capacity is usually either not measured or not planned at all and above all we are simply used to doing everything that needs to be done – no matter how long it takes.
However, there are some pretty obvious indications you should be able to spot when looking at your basic business metrics.
Overtime. If 10+ hours working days in your firm are a habit for large portion of the staff you usually don’t need to look further. Concentrate here and inspect right away (see below). If your examination shows large amounts of overtime usually hiring more staff will be at least part of the solution. Please note however that this largely depends on your level of access to new lawyers and knowledge retention processes. Large, well established firms will have no problem continuing with the current strategy, at least for some time. However in my view, given their exposure and access to resources these are precisely the firms that should lead the new way of work instead of cultivating old patterns.
Final side note here. If you identify the need to hire more staff but can’t afford it, look into you pricing, costs and business model. This may not apply to a start-up, but if your business has been around for more than 18 months and you still experience this problem, it might not be calibrated well.
Billable hours or revenue per lawyer. Similarly, you may notice understaffing when looking at the billable hours per individual lawyer. If set up correctly, your internal metric for minimum billable hours should make room for non-billable assignments like business development, education or pro bono. The ratios will differ depending on seniority, but the billables will never be set at a 100%. So if you spot that a partner at your firm spends 90% of his time at billable work, alarm bells should go off. This partner is not doing what he should and the most common reason for it is that he doesn’t have enough people to delegate the work to. Associates billing 200+ hours per month may also look very good on paper, but an associate like that is burning out and not developing all necessary skills to move to higher positions. And he knows it. Not reacting will put you at risk of loosing a very good associate.
Annual leave. You might also check your annual leave statistics. If your employees repeatedly don’t use their free time in full there is a reason for it and it might not be their unwillingness to travel.
I think my firm is understaffed, what now?
First, consider raising the issue with your manager or wider management to see if the hipotesis is true and whether there is a clear trend in the data. Perhaps the firm is going through a temporary influx of demand. Usually if there is a 6-month period of demand surpassing normal capacity you should consider hiring.
Second, find the cause. This is extremely important, because in more than 80% of cases the real reason for work overload is not too much work but errors in hiring, training and task allocation. To assess you need to find out whether the overload is due to too much work or prolonged execution of assigned tasks. Identify understaffing only if the work assigned should take longer than the associate’s capacity.
For example, if your associate finishes an 8-hour drafting assignment in 12 hours he may require further training or shouldn’t be allocated that assignment in the first place. Even more commonly, perhaps the workflow for that assignment is poor which results in the delay. Of course, in rare cases that associate just needs to be replaced.
Overall, in majority of cases it is not understaffing that causes work overload but the organisation of work. Careful review of processes and implementation of changes might bring astonishing results. If you think this might be the case in your firm, try following assessment techniques: Time Motion Study and GEMBA Walk.
And lastly, before taking on new lawyers remember to review your recruitment, onboarding and workflows. As a rule of thumb, you look for the following:
- Your recruitment should have clearly defined metrics of the ideal candidate and appropriate assessment techniques;
- Your onboarding process and documentation should allow the new lawyer to work at full capacity within 1 week;
- Your workflows should be specific and documented so uncertainty is limited;
- There should be a knowledge retention system that allows the new lawyer to access all relevant knowledge with minimum guidance.
By contrast, if these are not done right the result will be more burden on your lawyers, who will not only need to do their job but also teach new team members and review their work. Chaotic hiring and onboarding process will cause chaotic work and almost certain a decrease of output quality. Sadly, once made, this mistake is very hard to reverse as habits creep in and resistance to change kicks in.
Where’s the balance?
‘Ok’ – one would say – ‘but how will I know that my staffing is right?’ Well, as almost every lawyerly answer will tell you… it depends.
Each law firm and team has different calibrations of their desired workload. There are teams of true passionates working long hours and having fun. And that’s ok. Also, there are practice-specific differences in workload, for example pre-trial phase in litigation or closing part of a transaction. So where to start?
First, you need the numbers. After all, law firm is a business and it needs to meet its strategic objectives in terms of revenue, development and mission. Assessment of those will lead to a business case, which will lead to a budget, which will lead to the minimum number of billable hours per lawyer. The remaining allocation will be determined by your firm’s strategy.
Then bring the strategy to your team. They should be the ones to decide how they want to work within the business metrics you set. Leave them with your expectations and let them design a plan. This simple yet powerful technique has numerous advantages, among which lies the responsibility for their own work-life balance and feeling of empowerment.
Lastly, follow kaizen thinking and never stop improving your workflows and internal processes. One of the best ways to ensure your lawyers’ time will be used in the best way is to allocate small chunk of it to assessment, deliberation and improvement.
I hope you found this article useful. If you have any questions or want to share your view on the matter – please contact me.
