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Flexibility in law: A changing landscape

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Can the legal sector offer women roles that ease the pain of managing work and childcare? Totum knows, and works with, the firms that are forging ahead in supporting female talent.

A BBC Radio 4 programme ‘You and Yours’ recently put UK childcare costs under the spotlight once again. Many parents welcomed the introduction of 30-hours’ free childcare for their three and four-year-olds – a rise from the previous 15 hours. But, as this feature showed, these offerings never come without complications. On one hand nurseries have complained that they cannot afford to cover their costs under new funding levels, while on the other, parents of younger children worry that additional costs will be passed onto them through higher fees.

For all parents, it’s another reminder of the difficult juggle faced in returning to work after having children. For many (typically mothers) the rise of flexible and part-time work has been a God-send allowing some room for manoeuvre to balance work and childcare. But as this programme showed, it remains for many a difficult financial balance: returning to work is critical to maintain the family income but pointless if wiped out by childcare costs.

Some parents return to work knowing that any income will be flatlined by nursery fees. They are effectively working for nothing. But they do so for the long-term payback of remaining in work and progressing their careers as best they can through these early years.

But this is a fact that can still be lost on employers and colleagues who do not face the childcare juggle. There can still be an obstacle to offering good part-time and flexible work – an inability to see how a job can be done differently as well as a view that such employees are ‘less committed’ than their full-time counterparts. The need to strictly leave the office on time to collect a child from nursery can still be frowned upon by those who can stay after hours.

Given what many women go through to get back to work after having children, however, it seems deeply unfair to stereotype them with a lack of commitment. If they have an employer that understands and supports their return to work with decently paid, flexible contracts, mothers will also likely offer loyalty and a keen motivation to get the job done well in the time given. They have a lot to lose if they don’t.

That is why at Totum we are delighted to be working with more law firms that understand the benefits of retaining female talent after having children. In recent years, many firms have launched programmes to support mothers returning to work after maternity leave. Meanwhile, and perhaps more importantly, we are seeing more flexible and part-time business services roles come into law. Current opportunities we are working on at Totum include a three-day job share as a BD and Marketing Project Manager, plus part-time COO and Finance Director roles. Flexible options at these most senior levels of law are a sign of changing culture – a belief that things can indeed be done differently.

This is great news for all parents, but particularly mums who still typically face the childcare juggle. Nursery costs are never going to go away – the financial and logistical balancing act goes on. But with more employers – including law firms – offering a way for parents to manage childcare alongside interesting and career-progressing work, the struggle may become easier. And the bonus is that employers get to retain the talent that promotes business growth. A win-win in our book.

If you would like to know more about Totum’s flexible and full-time roles in the legal sector, please contact Deborah.Gray@TotumPartners.com

You can also follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter

 

Promoted by WiC on behalf of Totum Partners

Internships increase and over half lead to top graduate job offers, report reveals

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Businesses are hiring more interns, increasing their salaries, investing in quality programmes and working harder to bring them back as employees.

  • Employers hired 6% more interns in 2018
  • 94% of employers encourage interns to return as employees
  • 57% of interns offered jobs on graduate schemes
  • 87% of interns who are offered jobs accept

Institute of Student Employers (ISE) Internship Report surveyed 107 employers who invested at least £13 million to recruit 7,532 paid interns this year. Internship opportunities were available in all UK regions with 52% of vacancies outside of London.

While median salaries rose by 1% to £350 per week, a quarter of employers pay at least £408 per week and 21% of employers pay their interns a salary equivalent to £21,500 (median starting salary for all UK graduates according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency).

As well as increasing the volume of internships, employers are broadening their offer. Employers have historically offered opportunities to penultimate year university students on fixed summer programmes. This year 62% did not restrict their internships to penultimate year students and 30% of employers hired first year students as interns, up from 22% in 2017.

Internships provide a viable route to a graduate job with 74% of employers making a job offer straight away after the internship has finished and one in ten offering a financial incentive.

Seventy per cent of employers said that interns out-perform graduates in some way with 35% stating that interns perform better on the job and 18% said that former interns stay longer.

Stephen Isherwood, Chief Executive of the ISE said:

The market for interns is getting more competitive, so employers are investing more than ever before. The reason for this is simple: interns make better hires. Former interns are more likely to accept job offers, stay longer and often outperform their peers.

This highlights the importance of internships to employability. Students need to be aware that competition for programmes has intensified, but there are more paid opportunities out there. There are lots of ways that students can engage with employers from social media to on campus, but they will need to be prepared for the selection process, which is thorough and can involve assessment centres, psychometric tests and video interviews.

Totum research shows women taking the lead in law

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For some time, Totum has seen more women making headway at leadership levels in business services functions in law. But we are delighted to now be able to put some figures behind what we know from our experience of working with talented business women in the legal sector. These show that more women are being shortlisted and placed at law firms, and in more senior roles.

At Totum, we focus on business services teams in law. This includes roles across all levels of seniority in BD & marketing, HR, IT and finance functions, as well as other cross-functional roles in areas like project and process management, innovation and change. A fair bit of our work and time is spent on ‘retained’ projects – this is where a law firm exclusively selects Totum to work on a particular role or roles. These projects are conducted on a retained basis, because they tend to be more complex and difficult to source – they are generally, therefore, more senior.

Our findings

We conducted research into the retained projects we’ve worked on over the past three years – since 2015. In this time, our retained work distribution split across roles as follows: Director (45%), Head of (28%), COO/CEO/CFO type roles (20%), Manager (5%) and Executive (2%). As you can see, retained projects tend to favour more leadership roles.

But what is really interesting is how many women are now getting shortlisted and placed in these jobs. We already knew from our diversity statistics that we enjoy an equal gender balance among our candidates, if not slightly weighted towards women, with 56% female and 44% male candidates in 2017. But this research has found the numbers of women rising in our retained work too. So, while in 2015/16, only 23% of shortlisted candidates for retained roles were women, in 2016/17 this figure rose to 44% and for 2017/18, it was up again by three percentage points to 47%. Nearly even-stevens with men.

Not only that but more women are also being placed in these roles. Back in 2015/16, we had a 70:30 ratio of men getting placed in these positions compared to women; this flipped to a 43:57 ratio in favour of women in 2016/7, and we now have a perfect 50:50 balance in 2017/18. This is fantastic news and something to be celebrated.

Role modelling the future

A great example of women getting ahead in law is Sadia Baron, Chief Marketing Officer at Reed Smith, who is also featured as a case study on our leadership microsite (www.totumleadership.com). She joined Reed Smith in 2013 as Director of Marketing, EMEA, but before long she had taken on a second job as well – as Director of the BD function for the firm’s Business and Finance function. When she became CMO in September 2016, it was the logical culmination of her huge input over the past three years. But it was also an example of how doors are increasingly opening to talented women who want to make an impact at the highest levels of this fast-changing profession.

Yes, we know we have some way to go yet. Women lawyers still lag behind men in achieving partnership in the legal profession. And law firms still need to work on delivering the kind of workplace flexibility that women often need to stay within the profession, and to advance and work at the highest levels – and that goes for business services professionals and lawyers.

But things are changing – and in business services functions, particularly fast. We are delighted to have been able to work with so many talented women who are taking the lead and changing the legal sector from within.

If you would like more information on Totum please visit our website  where you will also find a number of roles at all levels.

You can also follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter

 

Why are women are exiting your organisation.

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The exit interview is a dying breed at a time when so many questions are being asked about how to retain the best talent, how to increase diversity at all levels in organisations and how to engage the younger generations just entering the job market with a different set of expectations and approaches.

So much of the people management in organisations is now being delivered electronically which takes out a crucial opportunity to really understand what makes people stay in your organisation – and why do they leave.

When this is applied to women, it is particularly important, as during their tenure many women fear calling out any potential discriminatory practices or behaviours for fear of staining their reputation in their industry. This leads organisations down a slippery path – your women leave the organisation and you may never find out why, yet you can almost guarantee that those reasons will come out eventually and if they contain any kind of misogyny or sexism, the reputation of your organisation can get tarnished before you even know it is happening.

The power of movements such as #TimesUp originate from women’s frustration at not having a supportive platform to communicate the behaviour and treatment that they have been exposed to. When given that opportunity, it is clear that there are deep seated and embedded discriminatory practices that go unchallenged and these only come to light by providing a safe supportive environment where women feel that what they say will be used positively and most critically – acted upon.

If you are leaving an organisation, leaving the industry entirely, or maybe stopping any economic activity, it is still vital that you feel heard about your experiences there, and that may not happen through the standard leaver processes followed by so many businesses.

If your business no longer uses exit interviews, maybe believing that there was nothing of value in them, then your process wasn’t asking the right questions, or interpreting the answers correctly. Instead there is a missed opportunity in the lack of analysis of valuable data that may contain the secret to attracting and retaining a talented pool of women critical to your business’ future success.

Stay engaged until the very last minute with each employee and learn how to get better at making them not want to leave.

 

[Words:  Lee Lam, Lee Lam Consulting]