Remote legal work: Part 3 - overcommunicate

Your team will have certain unwritten norms about how they work and interact. Suddenly without a common space, many of those norms don’t work.  But there is a huge opportunity to break some bad habits that might have crept in without any notice. Look for the opportunity to be deliberate about how you communicate with your team, re-set expectations and design some ground rules that work better. Free Range Lawyers have some excellent tips on how to manage lawyers working remotely. 

Online tools

Working remotely makes it harder to pass by and see if someone is free to speak. Shared calendars can help to let your team know when you are available. Findtime in Office 365 or Doddle will find free time in multiple calendars to avoid time wasting to and fro to set up mutually convenient time to speak.

If you need distraction free time in order to juggle work and the demands of home schooling, carve out some time and tell your team when you will be back online. The Insight function in Office 365 calendar will find focus time for you.

Try to spread the load for enabling team communication. It might help to assign a buddy to help people settle into remote work. Get them to check in on each other regularly. Instant messaging tools like Slack, Yammer (part of Office 365) and Facebook Workplace can be good for informal conversations that don’t need to clog up email inboxes.

Remote work has real benefits

There are successful companies that have been using a virtual workforce by choice. They access talented workers without geographical restraints and give people control over their work environment. If you want to read more (once you have the time) check out It doesn’t have to be crazy at work written by the founders of Basecamp who deliberately chose not to grow but to keep their business a calm and manageable size. 

Culture Amp is a virtual company who have shared a useful checklist of how to operate a successful remote workforce. You can't accomplish all of it instantly but it is a useful guide to what your employees will be wondering about. Pick two or three things you want to consciously try to address to start with.

Encourage boundaries

If you have diligent committed team members one of the challenges of remote work will be making sure they are not overworking. Without a commute, it can be easy to let working hours trickle over.  Encourage your team to set working hours and stick to them. They can be flexible to accommodate caring responsibilities but there needs to be healthy limits.

Be open

People tend to fill a void by assuming the worst, particularly when scared by uncertainty. Don’t be afraid to speak because you don’t have all the answers yet. Explain what the plan is but that somethings are unknown and it may change depending on what develops. Your team just want to know that you have seen the iceberg, even if no one knows how big it is. It is crucial that you are delivering the same message to all of the team and, if at all possible, at the same time. 

Talk about the numbers

Leaders often don’t want to share details about what it costs to keep a business open. In extraordinary times, when you need your team to pull together, think about the power of a collective target. You don’t need to give a line by line breakdown but you need everyone to clearly understand what they need to contribute for the team to achieve the target. If you avoid talking about profitability of the business then you can’t blame your team for not understanding your expectations.

Need some help?

I'm sharing some ideas on some easily accessible and low cost tools you can use to work remotely, based on what I've learned working as a remote litigation lawyer. If you are new to working from home let me know what you are finding a challenge and I will see if I can help.

If you are looking for more information about low cost ways you can improve how you work, I put lots more ideas in my ebook 5 ways to future proof your law firm which you can download at www.mclaylegal.com.