Call It a Crisis: Law Firms Need to Quickly Respond to Needs of Working Parents
Photo by Alexander Dummer on Unsplash
Originally shared on August 12, 2020 at law.com. Written with Malini Nangia.
Imagine you are on the leadership team of any large organization in this country. A tornado has torn through a city where the majority of your employees live. Or a wildfire has leveled the homes of people who work for you. Perhaps some other unforeseen tragedy has both individually and collectively rocked large swaths of your workforce. What measures would your organization take in such a situation? Hire counselors to help your team members grieve, talk about it, and start to plan what comes next? Reach out personally to particularly hard-hit employees to offer support or ask what might help? Consider allocating funds or other resources that show your solidarity with your people through a difficult time?
Consider this: The parents who work for you are currently living through a crisis. And they have been for five months. It is by no means over, nor is it showing any signs of resolving. In fact, ask any parent and they will tell you their deepest fear is that this crisis will be with us for many, many months with no relief in sight. Meanwhile, these same parents are being asked to work and lead as if nothing has changed on the home front.
In short: We are currently in the middle of a child care crisis in this country. And parents are not alright. Your employees, especially those who have younger children, and, yes, disproportionately the moms, are operating in pure survival mode. In April 2020, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a working paper underscoring that COVID-19 may have a disproportionate impact on women. And what’s so surreal about it is there has been no national dialogue—no reckoning with the expectation that parents continue to be fully productive at work while also caring for children who need near-constant supervision, direction and teaching.
This crisis is the source of too many consequences to list here. Among them are serious issues of equity, health and safety, and the future of public education. But the consequence we invite you to consider now is that your employees are in the midst of deciding what their future looks like and, in many cases, whether it includes you.
A recent study suggests that 1 in 5 parents are considering leaving the workforce due to the impact of COVID-19. Most recently, Goldman Sachs economists headlined that many parents may have to stop working entirely if schools don’t open and COVID-19 could “tilt the scales back in favor of men” remaining in the workforce. Just imagine it for a moment. Right now, your high-potential team members are wondering if it’s really worth it to stay on this career path. Some of your most profitable associates are doing the math to see if they can live on one income and never return to your office again. The women you work so hard to retain are exhausted and at the end of their ropes. What are you doing to retain them? What have you done to acknowledge their struggle? How have you shown them that you are working just as hard as they are to try to figure out how to make this work for them?
Given what’s at stake, call it what it is: a crisis. Now, what can we do to try to address this crisis within the legal industry? Here are some of our ideas.
Individual outreach. While employers have historically behaved, for the most part, as if their employees’ personal and family lives stopped and started at the door of the office, COVID-19 is breaking down this traditional separation. Homes have become workplaces that are now inhabited with children as quasi co-workers. As a result of this convergence, family circumstances have a direct impact on well-being, engagement, work productivity and bottom lines. To retain talent, it is imperative for firm leaders to initiate and enter into the discussion with working parents and establish a framework for frequent check-ins. While leaders may develop the framework of those conversations in conjunction with HR, it is important to recognize that no two conversations will be identical given the unique makeup and circumstances of each family. As such, creating space for a dialogue between each employee and the leaders with whom they work is crucial to identify their specific pain points and potential solutions. Having such conversations in earnest and listening to the concerns of each employee can help to shore up their engagement and, potentially, lead to their retention.
Empower the collective. Beyond individual check-ins, law firm leadership can also leverage collective platforms such as working parents affinity groups to enter into and stay in dialogue. From the law firm’s perspective, affinity groups may be an opportunity to highlight firm resources, feature webinars on how to navigate issues relevant to parents, roll out initiatives and discover common problems parents face that the firm may be able to help with. Based on our experience providing coaching support for working parent affinity groups, it is critical to select firm leaders who align with this group and encourage them to stay visible, active and highly engaged. To the extent your law firm does not have such a group, here is a great article to help you launch one.
Additional support mechanisms. Law firms may also consider a suite of additional resources, some micro-add-ons and some more sweeping initiatives, to support working parents.
EAP and counseling services. Law firms can bolster and promote the use of counseling as a support for associate well-being, through EAP and other similar programs.
Subscription-based services. Subsidizing mindfulness/meditation subscriptions, such as Headspace or Calm, can be a tool to support your employees’ well-being.
Coaching. Laser-focused coaching is a powerful tool to support lawyers in navigating the challenges and obstacles created by the pandemic.
Revisiting and revising flex schedules. Proactively encouraging and working with lawyers to take advantage of agile working and flexible-working arrangements without compromising work and advancement opportunities for those involved. To borrow from the parental leave framework, consider exploring a ramp down for a defined period of time without financial or other repercussions.
Revisiting paid family leave. Law firms can encourage attorneys to take advantage of statutory paid family leave. While this leave may not result in full income replacement, it can provide some level of compensation without an attorney having to resign and abandon the workforce entirely. Even further, law firms may elect to “top off” statutory paid family leave thereby getting an employee closer to total compensation levels. Recently, many tech giants, such as Microsoft, are giving employees an additional three months of paid parental leave to deal with extended school closures in COVID-19. Employees can elect how they utilize the leave (consecutive or a few days at a time) in a program at Microsoft called “12 week Paid Pandemic School and Childcare Closure Leave.” Google has also created a similar initiative. It remains to be seen whether law firms have the financial capacity to emulate Google and Microsoft initiatives.
Adjust billable hour expectations. One of the most stressful elements of any lawyer’s job, even when there is no pandemic raging and their kids are able to attend school, is the billable hour. Fear of not hitting minimums set by firms can keep lawyers—in the best of times—from taking good care of their well-being, spending extra time with their families, and taking much needed vacation. During this crisis, firms could alleviate this drive to cut out self-care, downtime and family time by reducing or even eliminating concerns over the billable hour. Consider making time spent caring for family or schooling children partially creditable or implementing a billable hour holiday during which billable hours expectations are reduced or eliminated.
Throw (more) money at the problem. With schools staying closed, child care and related education costs for your associates are skyrocketing. Parents are looking at additional monthly costs in the thousands of dollars to ensure that their children, who would typically be in school, are cared for and educated (and kept out of their busy parents’ conference calls). These parents cannot be both fully productive lawyers and full-time educators and caretakers. Whatever firms can do by offering stipends or bonuses to parents to help defray these costs will ease the strain on these employees.
Innovations in child care benefits. This pandemic provides a unique entry point for employers to confront and tackle child care challenges in such a way that may differentiate them in the gender and inclusivity landscape for years to come. In an Aug. 2 press release, McDermott Will & Emery announced it will partner with Homethrive to offer employees family elder care benefits. COVID-19 affords a unique opportunity to reimagine the nexus between law firms and child care in an attempt to not only retain working moms during the pandemic, but to attract working moms long after COVID-19 is over. Initiatives ranging from subsidizing at-home child care or classes through platforms such as Outschool or offering virtual child care through companies such as Flexable may be forward-looking initiatives. Partnering with child care-providers like Bright Horizons to expand assistance may also provide a support structure for parents.
Transparent commitment across law firms. Finally, just as tech companies such as Zoom, Salesforce, Uber, etc., have signed an “Invest In Parents” initiative, it is imperative that the legal industry similarly demonstrate clear commitment to, and investment in, working parents. Such a collective action can build public pressure among law firms to provide better resources and support for working parents during this unprecedented time.
If law firms do nothing, or fail to respond to this crisis with real solutions, they run the risk of facing a long-term talent exodus as working mothers self-select out of the law firm workforce. As we said, parents—particularly moms—are not alright. However, this is not a crisis without hope. It is actually an opportunity of epic proportions for law firm leaders to do what they do best—innovate, strategize and solve complex, multilayered challenges. If the parents who work for you were your clients, and they asked you to help solve this problem, what would you come up with? Don’t shy away from this. Instead, bring the genius of your lawyers and leaders to the table. You might be surprised at the possibilities that emerge.
