What are law firms doing to train staff remotely?

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While working from home clearly brings a myriad of benefits both for individuals and businesses, so too does working in the office, and it seems clear that the majority of professionals are now recognising this as they return to their physical offices more frequently.

Academic research found that only around 23% wanted to work from home every day, while 59% wanted a mixture of home and office working. Separate research by Thomson Reuters last summer (Stellar Performance: A Survey of Standout Talent) also looked specifically at senior talent within law firms and found that individuals are now more open to working in a hybrid manner and wanted to work 2.1 days at home on average.

It’s clear that people understand the benefits that both working from home and in the office.  With benefits, however, come challenges, and a particular challenge associated with remote working is stunted training and professional development. 

It’s easy to forget that staff don’t just benefit from the training itself, but also the environment they are being brought into for that training. In order for staff to retain the information they are being taught, they need to feel at ease in session, as well as engaged and included. It is important to give staff the opportunity to break the ice with one another before the session has started. It’s also important to incorporate ‘active learning’ – for example, quizzes, games and other techniques to help with engagement and retention.

There is a clear issue here.  As we all continue to work in a more hybrid way, how can law firms replicate the benefits that a good training environment can deliver in a virtual setting?

Delegates aren’t sitting next to one another while they are waiting for the training session to begin. They have no opportunity for general chat. Not only are they less likely to feel at ease sharing their thoughts by the time the session has begun, but they are also not getting the added benefit of networking and building good working relationships with people from different teams and departments.

In addition, many of the techniques that work well in a physical setting, such as the use of physical props and running quizzes, can’t be transferred into a virtual setting without some forethought. When people are not all in the same room, some activities just aren’t going to work.

How can training session organisers run successful virtual sessions?

1. Preparation

We are in a slightly more challenging environment now, and training organisers must make sure that they have planned out every aspect of the programme and asked the question “is this going to work in an online setting?”

It can be tempting to try and run the session in exactly the same way as you would in person – it’s often the case that it’s a training programme that is tried and tested, and has been used for years without issue. This is now irrelevant, and the risk is that the programme will not have the same impact that it did when it could be delivered in person.

If there’s any risk that an activity is going to be awkward, clumsy or difficult, consider if it could be tweaked slightly for an online setting or replaced with another activity entirely.

2. Make use of digital tools

The pandemic brought a real boom in technology and digital tools to all sectors, including legal.  Zoom, the videoconferencing software company, ended last year with a net profit of $671 million, up from just $22 million in 2020. With such a massive boom in online tools and software, you can rest assured that the number of products on the market that have been designed to perfectly complement hybrid working has absolutely skyrocketed.

This includes training tools and software. Some of the most effective tools that have proliferated in the market are online training portals. Many organisations have in the past created hubs to complement training programmes, hosting materials that participants can refer back to outside of sessions, but over the course of the pandemic some much more advanced portals have been developed. Many of these take lessons from social media platforms and are like ‘Facebooks’ for learning and development. Participants can use them outside of sessions to keep up with one another, complete online modules in readiness for their next session, post updates, feedback and thoughts on the programme, test their knowledge, and generally check in with one another.

To give an example, we launched a service like this for our freelance lawyers called ‘Vario Advance’, which was designed to give freelance lawyers the ability to learn and access materials whenever they want and from any location. The service has received great feedback from the freelancers on our books. Many firms are exploring this area, and whether they are tools you purchase from a provider or ones you develop yourself, the benefits they can bring to boosting engagement are enormous.

3. Track engagement and feedback

Data is at its most useful in times of change. Hybrid working is a relatively new phenomena and even two years after the beginning of the pandemic, businesses are still working out how to change their processes to best suit the new environment.

By collecting as much data and feedback as you can on participant engagement and retention, and comparing different training programmes against one another to see which techniques are working best (including older, pre-pandemic training where possible), firms can arm themselves with the information they need to continually improve them. Firms should constantly be looking to measure the success of their training programmes, making tweaks as they go to get them right.

Advances in technology can help here too – among all the new software and tech solutions on the market are a myriad of data collection and analytics tools. Firms need to ensure they are considering the full range of products available that could benefit their staff.

Matthew Kay, managing director of Vario at Pinsent Masons LLP.