The true impact of burnout in the legal sector
Apr 15, 2023
Burnout in the legal sector is a prevalent and increasing issue. 92% of lawyers have faced stress or burnout and 25% are experiencing it daily.* The impact on individuals is often long-lasting, with negative effects reported on 83% of workers’ personal relationships.**
So it’s clear this can’t be ignored.
The impact of individual’s experiencing burnout impacts many areas and businesses often look at the subsequent loss in productivity and the expense of recruitment and on-boarding. However, this still fails to evaluate the bearing this can have on organisations as a whole.
Increasing burnout rates in fast-paced environments have been occurring over many years, and 67% of UK legal professionals are still working longer hours than before the pandemic, despite saying they had more ‘flexible’ arrangements. This means the occurrence and impact of burnout is evolving, and how businesses approach this needs to evolve too.
Passionate employees can be true assets for fostering positive environments whilst generating profits and billable hours, but as a result, wellbeing can be overlooked. Not taking regular breaks or having stress-reducing resources available can build towards burnout.
Team’s that are working in a pressurized environment with steep deadlines and goals are reliant on everyone to keep up with the workload. However, pushing too hard and causing the burnout of one person, often knocks onto the rest of the team and other teams around them. As people take time to recover or even decide to look for a job elsewhere, the workload mounts up on others in the team. Which in turn, increases the potential of burnout affecting more people across the business.
Management is not immune to this effect. Not only has there been a sharp increase in burnout, for the last five or six years, senior partners and managers alike have seen additional pressures that didn’t exist a decade ago. From Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) to expectations of mobility and remote work, the challenges facing management are greater than they were a few short years ago. It’s not reasonable to expect managers to handle an ever-increasing workload without some form of support.
There are some key factors in reducing burnout in the legal sector, such as balancing workloads. Solicitors report spending nearly 40% of their day on tasks other than practicing law. When most firms are pushing for more and more billable hours, there is a significant amount of time spent on activities not related to the bottom line.
Fortunately, there are solutions available to support legal firms. And there are tools to mitigate the factors contributing to employee burnout can be deployed without requiring management to learn entirely new skill-sets in an impossibly short period of time.
Community Managers work to reduce feelings of isolation in remote and hybrid workers. These programs focus on improving employee satisfaction using actionable data and voice of the customer feedback. Communication and engagement teams provide a sense of community that creates a supportive, open environment.
Concierge services can make tough professional and personal workloads a lot easier to bear. Such services help minimize employee stress by organizing pending tasks, managing appointments, and arranging travel schedules, reducing distractions and enabling employees to focus better on their work tasks, thus leading to increased productivity, job satisfaction, and overall engagement.
Investing in employee wellbeing initiatives can yield long-term benefits for businesses, improving employee satisfaction and engagement while reducing turnover rates. Therefore, creating a positive work environment fosters sustained success and growth for businesses.
