When is a lawyer not a lawyer? When a lawyer is a human, which is most of the time. Kelly Frost spoke to Appleby managing director James Gaudin about why authenticity is the key to inclusivity and gender equality in the workplace
AS the saying goes: you cannot squeeze an elephant into a house. Instead, you have to change the size of the house so that the elephant can walk in comfortably.
When it comes to inclusivity – and particularly gender inclusivity – the Island’s law firms have long been that inflexible, unaccommodating and, at times, cramped house, with narrow walls, glass ceilings and few places for anyone, let alone an elephant, to sit comfortably.
PwC’s Channel Islands Women in Work Index 2023 found that Jersey ranked 15th out of 33 OECD countries (the UK was 14th and Guernsey was 16th) with a gender pay gap of 11%, a significant number of women out of work because of the ‘motherhood penalty’ and skyrocketing childcare costs.
The advantages of a diverse workplace are not only economic – PwC predicts a £77m boost to the Island’s GDP could be achieved by matching Jersey’s female labour force rates to those of countries such as Sweden – but also cultural and skills-based.
The report concludes that ‘significant barriers, such as the lack of flexibility from employers and the high costs of childcare, are disincentivising women, in particular, from working full time’.
Leyla Yildirim, the chief strategy officer at PwC Channel Islands, said: ‘We must make it a top priority to attract and incentivise everyone who is able and wants to return to come back into the workforce. Where we have known barriers to that being achieved, we must remove them.’
As inelegant as the metaphor goes, firms must take action, demolishing the walls and smashing the glass ceilings to allow a diverse team of colleagues to roam their halls. And this begins with that top-down decision to change the culture and get those renovations under way.
When James Gaudin became the managing partner of Appleby in March 2020, he instigated that change at a time when the world was changing too.
‘I’m not going to attempt to put a positive gloss on the pandemic, but I am a glass-half-full kind of person,’ said Mr Gaudin. ‘The way we describe that period is the fourth industrial revolution – the proper move to digital working.’
He added: ‘We already had flexible working, but the pandemic enabled myself, and other leaders in business, to accelerate the pace of change. I had always been a believer in accountability, so it never made sense to me that we were requiring our lawyers, IT team or accountants to sit at their desks for a period of time.
‘Law firms weren’t always the quickest to evolve and change working practices. When I took over, I wanted to put culture at the centre of everything.
‘There’s a terrible culture of presenteeism in professional services firms. If you were there, then you were working. But during the pandemic, that was eradicated overnight, and everyone did their jobs perfectly fine from home.’
And that, says Mr Gaudin, has had a huge impact on accessibility.
‘It has helped us enormously in terms of culture and allowed us to try new things and make the workplace a more accessible place for the team,’ he said. ‘We have an amazing group of clients who are largely working in the same way as us, and our content, engaged team of colleagues provides excellent service because they are engaged and content.
‘Lots of parents previously struggled to fit in the school drop-off and pick-up as well as other commitments, finding it incredibly stressful because the business wasn’t empowering them to do what was best for them. There are always times, especially in transactional work with lawyers, where things always need to be done, but everyone knows what their job is and what’s expected of them and they’re accountable to us for that.
‘Now we have colleagues working from Spain and Scotland, and we have parents who take time off in the afternoon to meet their obligations.
‘People might be out from 4pm to 7pm and then log on afterwards for a few hours. It’s about making sure that you’ve got the appropriate scenarios in place to allow people to decompress and get the appropriate amounts of rest.’
While those drastic measures broke down normal working practices hostile to family life, they also, Mr Gaudin contended, ‘broke down the professional persona’.
‘Professionals came to work dressed in a suit and worked in an office. Suddenly, you saw colleagues in their bedrooms or with their kids. It broke down a lot of those professional façades, and people were able – and were forced – to be a little more authentic.’
‘When I came through as a barrister and in investment banks in the 1990s, the profession was certainly not a beacon of inclusivity,’ he added.
‘Law firms are a staid profession for a number of reasons – namely, that we are a profession, we have a professional façade and that prevents you from being authentic. But we have come a long way, and now we are doing a lot more to accommodate individuals than we ever have before.
‘We are not trying to squeeze people into boxes, which is what we did as lawyers. We were expected to fit into a box that said Lawyers on it and do all the things expected of lawyers, whereas now we are trying to say, “What are you interested in? What are you good at? How can we help with that?”’
He said the ‘boys’ club attitude’ which used to persist throughout the profession was something he found ‘abhorrent’.
‘I wanted to break down the barriers for people, enabling them to have the courage and the conviction to challenge previously existing norms, without the fear that doing so would be detrimental to their careers. Under my leadership, I want to inspire confidence and trust and, fundamentally, change an antiquated culture.
‘The challenge for me bringing that as my centrepiece was actually being authentic about inclusion and diversity myself. That tone from the top was quite key. You do need the mechanics around it, but really it’s about attitude and education: teaching people about how to be authentic and making the workplace an inclusive and diverse environment.’
When it comes to the working environment in the Island, Mr Gaudin said Jersey may have a wider gender pay gap than the UK because it has been slower to take up initiatives.
‘We are a small place. You have this unique fishbowl environment, an agile environment, and we’ve picked up the pace in terms of inclusion, diversity and gender equality,’ he reflected.
‘We’re behind in the sense that some of the statutory protections that exist in the UK don’t necessarily exist here but I do think that, as a community, we have really accelerated the pace of change, which is fantastic and a credit to everyone.’
Appleby has been an early adopter of the Female Leaders Network, mental-health-first-aid training for all their teams, and committed to the 51 Employers’ Pledge, which promotes a menopause-friendly workplace.
‘We have done lots of good things to encourage people to be themselves,’ added Mr Gaudin, who was one of the speakers at this year’s International Women’s Day breakfast, organised by the Jersey Women’s Refuge.
The firm’s diversity and inclusion group was established even before the pandemic.
While Appleby does not have a gender pay gap, ‘one of the key issues was the drop you see after female lawyers have children’, Mr Gaudin said.
‘We’ve looked around the industry when it comes to improving our maternity and paternity policy,’ he said. ‘It is not a reason to hold back somebody, male or female, because they have had a child. That was a big change in the law more generally but in our firm, it has never held you back.
‘We have working parents who have had full support from the business before, during and after a child, whose careers have not been held back. We have so many examples of compressed hours or not working Fridays to help with their familial or personal arrangements.
‘If someone comes to me and asks for something, they will get the support to do that. As the leader of a business, and the leader of this business, I apply that uniformly across the board.
‘I am a firm supporter of gender equality, and I am delighted that the industry is no longer predominantly male-led. There is a real impetus to effect change.
‘While it is complicated, it does require a change of ethos, attitude and culture, and we have effected that change here. It’s about access and getting people into the right roles early on, not having a scenario where someone considers a particular role a male role or a female role.’
Part of that ‘role’ mentality, he says, comes at the recruitment stage.
‘We have generally moved away from traditional sources of promoting our jobs and we are doing a lot more through social media, and team members going out and giving an honest appraisal to the people who want to join about what the business is like and what life is like as a lawyer,’ he explained.
‘My attitude to recruitment is hiring people. There are boxes we need to tick to run a law firm, but it’s more about focusing on what they are good at and getting them to do that.
‘One of our administrators has decided that she likes to read documents and agreements and find errors, and so potentially, she’s going to move into a legal job and re-qualify. It’s not just about bringing people in. We hope to reskill, upskill and help them to become the best version of themselves.
‘I’m not sure if we will ever get to the situation where someone is the same at home and in the office, but it’s converged, which has been the right way.
‘The key thing for me is that everyone has a voice, everyone is heard and everyone is in a position where they feel able to be authentic. That’s what I’m trying to achieve.’
Taking that time to enlarge the house, increase flexibility, remove barriers and usher in an inclusive and diverse workplace, Mr Gaudin said, ultimately resulted in a greater sense of wellbeing.
‘If everyone feels included and able to be their authentic selves, this engenders trust, which leads to a much happier and more functional business, with a lower turnover of staff and significantly positive levels of staff engagement,’ he said. ‘That’s the advantage of having the sort of workplace that we have.’
