By Legal Futures’ Associates DPS Software
With what feels like the 10th lockdown in the past year, the same old challenges have arisen. How can your firm work from home efficiently, how can your firm go paperless to enable home working and how do you ensure compliance and security while everyone is at home? But another important issue for many firms is how to successfully manage your firm and individual teams virtually.
This was a challenge pointed out by one of our clients in a talk back in September on the various challenges for law firms thrown up by the pandemic. During the same event, Alison Lee, Managing Director of Biscoes Solicitors, another client of ours, gave a talk on how to build a successful team and raised some really interesting points (you can watch both talks here).
Managers should be good leaders, not just good fee earners
One of the main points that Alison raised was that the people in managerial positions in your firm should be good leaders. It can often be the case that the high performance of a fee earner can see them being promoted to a managerial position, only to find that that person is much better suited to fee earning than managing.
Appointing managers in this way can be damaging to your firm, so make sure you assess your team’s natural skillset to see who would make a good leader.
Set clear expectations and targets for leaders
You should ensure your leaders are fully on board with the direction that your firm is heading and give them clear targets. These targets should promote good management and may also involve a reduced costs target. This gives your leaders the freedom to focus on managing their team effectively and helping everyone else to meet costs targets.
Give them the skills and tools to succeed
With good leaders in place, you can’t then just rely on natural talent for them to manage their team successfully. You must help them to build their skills and provide them with the right tools to manage their team effectively.
While working from home this can be a challenge as you try to provide engaging, effective training at a time that suits everyone’s schedule. That’s why an e-learning platform, where your employees can get engaging, succinct training on demand is so important for the success of your firm right now.
With Access’s online e-learning platform you can give your leaders training on how to manage effectively, but also how to manage a virtual team. This, combined with training on governance, risk and compliance issues that law firm leaders should be on top of, gives your firm a great way to keep everyone in your firm fully trained and compliant.
But having good leaders with effective training isn’t enough to succeed with the majority of law firms now working from home. You also need effective software in place.
Software to manage your cases, accounts, compliance, communication and metrics. Without it, the efficiency and productivity of your firm are greatly hampered.
With the right technology in place, managing your team virtually can become a whole lot easier. Collaboration, checking workloads and performance become seamless whereas without tech, these things would be difficult at best.
Join us in our webinar on the 14th January at 12:30 where we’ll provide you with more tips on how to manage your team successfully from home and show how Access Legal’s range of solutions can help.
Just click here to register and if you can’t attend on the day, we’ll send you the recording.
