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23 Sep 2020
by Ellie Vaughan

Ellie Vaughan on preventing mental ill-health in a high-pressured environment

Herbert Smith Freehills is a leading global professional services firm, with over 5,000 employees and partners in 26 locations, including 2,000 lawyers.

 

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It’s no secret that mental health and resilience have been high on the agenda for many law firms for a number of years, and that includes for us.

The nature of legal work can contribute to mental ill-health. Across the sector, many lawyers are charged out by the hour, which results in some people in the industry working extremely long hours on very complex work in a high pressured and competitive environment, with their professional success often judged on this. Without support, that can lead to long term mental ill-health in varying degrees.

There aren’t many sectors in which you can see a direct link between the resilience of individuals and the resilience of the business. However, professional services is definitely one of them. We have been developing strategies and resources to help our people manage their mental health and resilience for some time. As a result, when the COVID-19 lockdown started, we already had the foundations in place to help staff – but we still had to adapt.

We have been very fortunate that the majority of our people could work from home and we had the systems to support that. However, working from home still brought its challenges. For example, the need to juggle work and responsibilities for dependent care, which can result in very long days, and a range of distractions that can have an impact on individuals’ level of focus.

To support staff, we focused on four key areas. The first was around offering flexibility in the way they work. We allowed employees to adapt their working situation to complement their home life as much as possible to make sure they could find time to completely switch off. Handing that control back to employees has been a powerful way to help them to build resilience.

We’ve signposted all the support on mental health and resilience that is available to our people. We recently implemented a new global employee assistance programme, which has enabled us to provide a more consistent approach to offering mental health support, as well as encompass support for issues related to other areas such as financial wellbeing. Being able to offer proactive support can really help to stop those stresses contributing to mental ill-health.

Herbert Smith Freehills also has mental health champions who can raise awareness of the mental wellbeing support we offer. They are trained to spot signs and symptoms of mental ill-health so that we can direct help to people who need it the most.

In addition, we have focused on education and awareness for managers. With so many staff working from home, line managers are on the front line, so we are proactively supporting them to support their staff, and helping them get back to whatever the new version of normal will look like.

The author is Ellie Vaughan, global head of reward and benefits at Herbert Smith Freehills.