At one point in the middle of lockdowns, when everyone one was pretty much working from home, we were never going back to the office. The office was dead. Law firms were highly profitable and amazingly functional with everyone working remotely, writes Stuart Barnett.
Now it seems many law firms have settled on a three-days-per-week-in-the-office policy. What might have worked when faced with a world pandemic, isn’t necessarily the best way forward when the world isn’t in various degrees of lockdown.
What the hybrid model provides is a wider variety of working practices that take into account the preferences of staff who have become accustomed to the flexibility of WFH. It’s something largely unthinkable in big law firms prior to COVID-19. Necessity is an insistent change maker.
This is not a settled debate. And one with strongly held views. Suggesting recently that your career could be impacted by an absence of human face-to-face interaction, my LinkedIn post was met with some staunch resistance. A follow-up poll revealed that 47 per cent of people said that WFH would have a negative impact on their career and 40 per cent positive, 7 per cent no change. (The other 7 per cent agreed it would give them more time to vote in polls).
Personally, I think there are some things best done in person. Online interactions can liberate you from place and travel, but the serendipity of face-to-face interactions that happen in the office is very difficult to replicate. A coffee chat is far more valuable to relationship building than a messenger chat.
To be fair, this may be a generational thing.
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