In This Severe Weather...

We are, apparently, experiencing extreme weather. Anyone from outside the UK may find that rather difficult to understand. My brother, for example, lives in Sydney in Australia and so thinks of thirty celcius as Spring-like.

Whatever your own thoughts about the temperature, the chances are that your staff (and colleagues) think that the weather is extreme and so it is. The fact is that you, as a manager, will have to deal with it. Happily, it is possible to deal with staff concerns and do some good for the organisation at the same time.

• Be a little more relaxed about the hours that people work. Is it really necessary that everyone works between the hours of 8:30 and 18:00? Why not let some people come in at 7:30 and so avoid a hot and sticky commute (in both directions probably?). Why not let some come in at 10:00 and leave at 20:00?
• Be a little more relaxed about what people wear. If they are not customer facing, do they really need to be in a suit and tie? If there is no air conditioning in the office, why not chill a bit about the dress code (see what I did there?).
• Buy some ice cream for your team. It's a simple thing - and don't be fooled into thinking that they will love you forever - but staff will notice and acknowledge your gesture. The British, too, find ice cream almost sinful, so you can all share that 'naughty' moment together.

Goodness knows - if you manage to get through the next few weeks being flexible and buying ice cream, you might be able to continue this for the rest of the year too. All the positive benefits that come from these simple actions might surprise you - or you may, of course think that it's all madness!

Noticing the Mood of the Market

There are times when lawyers really don't help themselves.

Anyone who knows me will know that I do not profess to be a marketing person. I like to think, however, that I understand how to judge the mood of my market place. Sadly it would seem that, at least, the legal press either don't understand the mood of the 'ordinary person' (i.e. not a lawyer), or that they have judged the mood of their market (i.e. lawyers) perfectly and it is the lawyers themselves who are out of step. Let's hope it is the later.

I am talking about a headline in "The Lawyer" today (see their full story here):

Perhaps I'm being over-sensitive. To me, however, when I read this I have a mental picture of a money-grabbing lawyer delighting in suffering in order to win large fees from (ideally unnecessary) lawsuits. let me stress that I am sure this is absolutely not the case at Reed Smith or Bakers - however it would be easy to get that impression from the rather delighted tone of the headline.

Perception is an important thing, and these sort of headlines really don't help. 

What Do Lawyers Care About - Weekly Result

So - a whole week of analysing the news page of "The Lawyer" (on the principle that this will reflect the things that lawyers care about) and what can we say. Well - let's first look at the charts.

The split of topics discussed (and I immediately admit that my categories are completely arbitrary) is as follows (click on the picture for an enlarged version:

I then further grouped my categories into "About Lawyers" and "About Clients":

So - after a week of looking at the news topics aimed at lawyers, it would appear that most of the discussion (90% in fact) concerns lawyers themselves rather than anything at all about their clients. Given that "The Lawyer" is a public forum, I'm a little surprised to see that lawyers are apparently so little concerned about their clients. Surely the best advertisement about the quality of a firm or a lawyer is success on behalf of their clients - and yet stories about "Client Success" occupied only 3.3% of the news. Maybe it was a quiet week...

Less surprising to me was the fact that a third of the stories were to do with lawyers moving firms and that a further 16.7% were about the money that lawyers earn. Together these made up a very neat 50% of the news - and therefore, arguably, what lawyers care about.

So what?

Well - even if lawyers really do care so little about their clients, I'd suggest that their PR people work harder on positive stories about the work done for clients. We do look at these sort of news pages, you know. And if lawyers really do care about their clients - and lets say that most of them do - then they should be talking about that more, and about how much they and their firms earn a great deal less.