It is without doubt that the Covid-19 pandemic has forced businesses to embrace flexible working and there are no signs that this is going to cease in the post-Covid world. In July 2021, an ACAS study suggested that half of all employers in Great Britain expect an increase in demand for flexible working patterns from their employees. At this point in time, the government is analysing feedback from a public consultation process on making remote working the default.
The consultation sought feedback on a set of proposals based on the principle that working arrangements are best decided through constructive and open-minded discussions between employer and employee. In many professions, working from home is simply not suitable, and ministers are therefore seeking not to prescribe specific arrangements in legislation that make a “right to request” working from home a “right to have”, but rather enable a framework for the conversation around working patterns to take place openly and fairly.
As the public waits for the government’s next move as it analyses feedback from the public, one business leader in the legal sector believes that the workplace of the future ought to be one that has flexibility at its heart.
Bhumika Parmar is the director and founder of BP Legal Solicitors, a high-street legal practice in Leicester established in 2009 and specialising in residential and commercial property, family law and wills & probate.
Speaking on the Leaders Council Podcast to initially share her take on new working arrangements within her own business that emerged as a result of the pandemic, Bhumika said: “The scope of my firm has always been set up in a very modern tech way from the outset. So, when it transpired that we would all be going into lockdown, naturally business owners panicked. But I quickly realised we could all work remotely, and work effectively doing so.
“We all pretty much work in the cloud these days which helped facilitate that, but the main thing for me as a business leader and as a solicitor operating remotely was to keep overlooking the work of our more junior staff. Not necessarily monitoring, but rather checking what and how they were doing and ensuring our compliance was necessary, and I was still able to do that from afar. We coped without our fax machines, we coped without all our admin staff in the office, and we did it by organisationally reshuffling, rearranging working hours and maintaining very open contact through mediums such as Microsoft Teams.
“We also kept in touch with our clients, and we enlisted further assistance with outbound calls through an external company where we needed it.”
However, one of the key aspects for Bhumika was to ensure the wellbeing of her staff while working from home.
“My concern mainly was that we were all working from home and what impact that might have on the wellbeing of my staff. It is stressful in the legal world as it is and I thought with us all working from home and having children at home with them, would my staff be able to manage in that situation? I understood the pressures they were going through as a mother myself, so I offered a lot of flexibility in terms of what my staff took on and what they couldn’t do. I also made the effort to contact them on a daily basis - not about work - but about how they were getting on, and whether I could do more for them.
“This all comes from the fact that in my business, I have always given flexibility as a core value. One of the things that I have always had at the forefront of my firm is that I am a strong believer in working parents being able to be active in their child's life. I give my staff the time off for sports days and other school activities because it is important that they don’t miss these milestones in their child’s life.”
As a business leader in the legal profession who has always provided flexibility for working parents on her team, Bhumika believes that it will be at the heart of working practices in the future, particularly in the legal sector, long after Covid-19 has passed. Furthermore, she believes that it could even hand a much-needed boost to productivity, since business leaders will be rewarded by their staff for the trust shown in them.
“I also think working from home and giving that flexibility also makes productivity great as well, and businesses have learnt a lot about that over the last couple of years. The single biggest barrier businesses have to home-working in the mainstream is trust. Trust is a two-way, or sometimes many-way thing to be honest. But, if you give them the olive branch to work flexibly as a leader, stay in contact with them and show you’re concerned for their welfare, you’ll reap the rewards in productivity. Businesses will have to move on because this is the modern way of working. Of course, not every job can be done from home, but certainly in the legal profession there is no reason why working from home cannot be an option across the board.”
Photo by Jason Strull on Unsplash
