The New Paradigm: How To Build An Effective Remote And Hybrid Work Environment

The pandemic has turned many people’s dining room tables into workplaces. Attorneys are no exception. What’s more, no one expects the legal industry to return to the pre-pandemic norm. A recent survey by the American Bar Association revealed that only 23 percent of the lawyers surveyed wanted to return to the office full time. The rest would like to see remote work or a hybrid situation become the new paradigm.

These survey results were shared by Prof. Ben Sachs of the University of Virginia School of Law at the Practising Law Institute’s program, “Managing Remote and Hybrid Legal Teams: Tactics to Thrive and Lead in the New World of Work.” Sachs, who is also president of the training and consulting firm The Landing Group, noted in the seminar that people are leaving their jobs at unprecedented rates.

“[O]ne of the things that’s driving those decisions is how much work-life balance they can get back,” Sachs said. “If you can have a great culture that supports hybrid and remote work, you’ve got an edge in recruiting. You’re going to have great happy teams and you’re going to deliver better work to clients, but there are some costs.”

The ABA survey showed that employees put in nearly an extra day of work per week after going remote. Also, women were 46 percent more likely to say the pandemic made it harder to keep work separate from home life. 

“So, there’s a real burnout risk. If not handled properly, we can create real problems for our firms,” Sachs said.

With good planning, however, these costs can be mitigated. He grouped the techniques he presented under three headings: be intentional, build documentation, and evaluate regularly. 

Be Intentional

When everyone worked in the office, Sachs explained, firms often relied on serendipity to resolve problems. If there was an email miscommunication, it could be resolved by running into someone by the coffee machine. A “distributed” work team (which can be fully remote or hybrid) can’t rely on chance encounters.

“We’ve got to be more intentional,” Sachs said.

This means deciding the culture you want and thinking structurally about how you’re going to implement that culture. This process will yield benefits even if everyone eventually goes back into the office. “If you do this right, your team will be more productive than they ever were.” 

The first item on the “be intentional” checklist is to make sure you address the career growth of employees, so they remain invested in the work and the firm.

“On most of the teams I worked with . . . that happened through casual conversations,” Sachs said. Remote work gives you the chance to set up a mechanism where this happens deliberately, to ensure no one is overlooked and everyone is heard. He suggested meetings dedicated to career growth every one to two quarters.

Sachs said this time should be scheduled separately from everything else, so it doesn’t devolve into a discussion of the latest brief. He provided prompts to help structure the conversation. 

Being intentional about how leaders divide work also ensures balance across the team. “Keep an actual spreadsheet of who’s doing what. Use project management software, if you can. And when you think about assigning new tasks, go back to that and make sure you’re doing so evenly,” he said.

Finally, Sachs cited the importance of advocacy in remote work environments. Although there is a tendency to remind employees to advocate for themselves, Sachs emphasized the importance of advocating for others to ensure no one falls through the cracks.

Advocacy builds empathy among co-workers, as does social interaction. While opportunities to socialize are challenging when people aren’t in the office regularly, Sachs said it’s crucial.

“It turns out data have shown [that social interactions] make our teams better in every way,” Sachs said. “People are more engaged in their jobs. They’re more productive in their work. They do higher-quality work. They stay at the firm or on the team longer, which is a huge benefit to everybody. And they require less time off for illness or stress. That last one really got me. They require less time off due to illness, meaning they either get sick less or get over it faster if you foster social connections and social support systems.”

Sachs offered techniques for incorporating social conversations into existing meetings, such as intentionally leaving space for small talk before getting to business during a Zoom meeting or carving out the first few minutes of weekly team meetings for people to share highlights and low-lights from their week. He also suggested remote meetings scheduled specifically for social activities like games. Sachs said that while these “remote social” activities may seem silly at first, they are effective. They create personal bonds.

The last suggestion Sachs offered, especially for teams with little or no time in the office: hold larger in-person events two to four times per year, pandemic permitting. Like traditional offsite events, these events can bring remote team members together for both bonding and bigger-picture work.

Another thing a hybrid team is likely to appreciate is cutting back on useless meetings. If a team can resolve an issue by email, do it. If a meeting is necessary, make sure the person attending remotely isn’t an afterthought. And while Sachs thinks that meetings are best with cameras to build that sense of connection, he also noted that Zoom fatigue is a real physiological phenomenon.

In addition, Zoom meetings can induce what is called mirror anxiety. “Studies show that 60-plus percent of the time you’re staring at yourself in a meeting, and that creates anxiety,” Sachs said. Allowing some “off-camera” breaks or having entire meetings off camera can help offset these effects, although these should be the exceptions, he counseled. 

Finally, firms should be intentional about using the right tools for remote meetings. 

“The worst thing you can do is go up to a whiteboard,” Sachs said, “and then try to point a laptop camera at the whiteboard for the remote participants. Please don’t do that. Go digital.”

Digital technology gives us tools to help with these problems, Sachs added. Digital whiteboards allow users to drag and drop-boxes similar to PowerPoint and project management software can organize information for your teams and allow them to share documents.

Build Documentation

Sachs asked a fundamental question: “Why do we make ‘osmosis’ the way we learn [how to work with] a team?” A new employee may need to learn the existence and location of templates, information about managers, the way to communicate vacation plans, and expectations for weekend work availability. 

Law firms could take a tip from the military, Sachs said. It has protocols for everything, so when a new team comes together, its members can more easily begin to work because expectations are clear.

Easy access to information is especially important during onboarding, Sachs continued, describing a “hybrid-team handbook” — a set of resources in a central destination, such as a folder on a shared drive.

“That first week when someone’s onboarding a new team, they’re drinking from the fire hose,” he said. “You’ve told them a lot of things they will never remember. When we document it, they’re way more likely to go back to this resource and find what they need.”

Another important thing a firm can do for hybrid and remote workers is to create team bios. “I don’t just mean a list of names and emails,” Sachs said. “There’s a lot more to it than that.” Sachs described a “Working with Me” page as a tool to help team members navigate each other’s working styles. It can answer questions like — what are your typical hours at your desk? Pet peeves? Do you prefer chat, phone, or text for quick questions? As well as other questions about our typical ways of working.

Sachs explained that rather than making team members learn these things slowly by trial and error, they can share working styles transparently from day one. “Just put it in the handbook, and now everyone has access to the same information.” 

Evaluate Regularly

Of course, all this documentation will accomplish nothing unless you keep an eye on effectiveness. One of the challenges with a remote or hybrid team is knowing when it needs help. Taking the temperature is much easier when everyone is in the office, so hybrid teams need different tools.

Sachs urged watching for signs like a lack of accountability, a lack of productive conflict (such as challenging each other’s ideas), people failing to feel ownership of their work, and a lack of trust. If allowed to fester, these weaknesses slowly “eat away at the system,” Sachs said. 

The challenge, Sachs said, is how to ensure these problems are brought to the surface early, especially in remote and hybrid environments where leaders may not have visibility into the day-to-day frustrations of the team. He suggested periodic short surveys “to identify pain points around remote work and hybrid work.”

Next, he described “retros,” team discussions focused on what has and has not been effective on a given project after the project has been completed.

Once the issues have been brought to the surface, Sachs suggested trying different problem-solving approaches than those typically employed at law firms. “Hackathons” are an idea Sachs borrowed from the tech world. These are something akin to brainstorming sessions — trying to come up with solutions in a short time. 

“Instead of saying, ‘Let’s assign a committee,’ and have that committee meet for one hour a week for the next six weeks,” Sachs suggested trying accelerated timeframes, such as clearing the schedule for eight hours so that the team can build uninterrupted momentum and end the day with more progress than a length committee process might yield. 

Sachs’s final suggestion to ensure ongoing evaluation is to assign a task force to oversee all these processes, an evergreen committee that can last for months or years, with different people cycling in and out. 

“Junior associates are great for this,” Sachs said, adding that it’s in the interest of any person engaged in remote or hybrid work to focus on making it better. However, he believes managing all this is going to get harder before it gets better as firms navigate the transition.

As a parting comment, Sachs urged people to remember that “remote work brings out an organization’s lack of organization. If you’re thoughtful about how you build your team, you’re going to build a great team regardless of where they work.” 

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Elizabeth M. Bennett was a business reporter who moved into legal journalism when she covered the Delaware courts, a beat that inspired her to go to law school. After a few years as a practicing attorney in the Philadelphia region, she decamped to the Pacific Northwest and returned to freelance reporting and editing.