After years of blogging and writing newsletters just to share things I’ve been learning, I’ve decided to dip my toes in the paid-newsletter world.
What do I think is so valuable that I would ask you to pay for it? For the last few years, I’ve been working and diving deep into the Microsoft 365 platform, from the perspective of an eDiscovery professional.
Unfortunately, I do believe we are taught the opposite of this. We are expected to work harder and harder and then use our time off to rest so that we can go back and do it some more. It’s all focused on being a good worker, but this study seems to indicate that we are all better off focusing on other parts of our lives during the time we spend away from work. Maybe, just maybe, we are more than our jobs. Maybe when we spend the energy and focus on other parts of our lives enough to plan them out and be intentional about them, we’re happier.
What a concept.
This one is a little harder for me because letting people know what I’ve been up to sounds an awful lot like self-promotion. I’ve never been super comfortable with people who are constantly promoting themselves and what they do. I certainly don’t want to become known for promoting myself all the time. The difference between the two was actually the subject of two episodes of the Work-Life Podcast earlier this year, and I thought the discussion between Wayne Turmel and Marisa Eikenberry was a fantastic exploration of the difference between being ethically visible (I stole the term from them, it’s that good!)
You can invest in your people, keeping their skills up-to-date for the constant change they will be faced with in the workplace, or you can view all of them as a simple cost to be cut down to the bare minimum.
If you do, at least consider the cost of hiring a bunch of new folks year after year.
Because you will be.
In other words, it’s successful when the organization puts together and supports an intentional mentorship program. When they don’t they become reliant on chance interactions in the office. That’s the difference. It’s not that hybrid and remote employees just can’t be trained and mentored. It’s that quality mentoring requires intention.
If you want to provide quality mentorship for your junior employees create and support a program to do that. Period. End of discussion. Where they are located is not relevant.
The question I’ve always had though, is what exactly changed and when did it change? Because I can’t believe most women go to law school and graduate planning on working at a large law firm for a few years and then leaving to go solo, in-house, public sector, or teaching at law school, despite the fact that it happens a lot! Again, in my anecdotal experience, it happens much more often than it does for male associates.
If we have a system that “works” for male lawyers this much more often than female or gender non-binary lawyers, maybe it’s not a good system.
If you’re a female attorney who’s left a law firm and wants to share your experience and reasons, I’d love to hear about it and possibly write about it. (You can reach out to me privately if you’d like to remain anonymous.) I am truly curious about what it’s like to graduate law school versus the reality of law firm life a few years later, and what law firms could have done to keep you.