Understandably there is a lot of money being poured into grants to try to solve the legal and advice sector’s workforce development, recruitment, and retention crisis. It’s heartening that funders are willing to invest so much money in these projects and I am sure that they will be incidentally sustaining other services with that money, but I’m not personally convinced that we’ll learn an awful lot that isn’t already obvious to many of us.
A few months ago, I wrote a blog post for LAPG about the inadequacy of legal aid. The partner article to that remains an unpublished draft but focussed on how charitable trusts and foundations almost always fail to offer funding which fully covers the costs of the projects and posts they are purportedly funding.
The charitable advice sector lives with this weird fiction that stuff costs less than it actually does. Everyone involved is happy for this fiction to continue because advice agencies feel less guilty about asking for money and the funders, who all know or should know that what they are being asked for is inadequate, get to stretch their grant pots that little bit further – helping just a few more organisations. What we are left with is a Frankenstein’s monster made by stitching together inadequate bits of grant funding and legal aid in the hope that the end result has two arms, two legs, a body and a head (or at least as close to that as is possible).
To make things worse, the limited terms applied to grant funding (often between 1 and three years) mean that, periodically, bits fall off….
The unavoidable truth is that this funding mess is at the heart of the recruitment, retention, and workforce development problem. Low pay, lack of cost-of-living increases and lack of job security is writ large across our inability to recruit and retain staff or to offer those that remain the development opportunities they need. Put bluntly, if we can’t sort this bit out then everything else discussed in this blog post is probably window dressing.
So how do we tackle this big problem. Here goes:
Firstly, advice agency managers and trustees need to properly understand and own the true full cost of employing a lawyer / caseworker. You’d be surprised at how many managers and Board’s don’t know this – but then who can blame them as most are accidental managers who have never had formal training on any of this stuff. Research undertaken by the Law Society showed that the median hourly cost in a law firm is around £100-£110. My own research suggests that in legal advice charities it’s closer to £70-£80 an hour. As a very rough and ready guide, a caseworker / solicitor in an average sized and structured agency, probably costs about twice their salary.
Once managers know and accept how much employing someone or running a project costs, they need to be open with funders about that and work with those funders to ensure that they fund at full cost. Sadly, this probably means that funders will be able to fund fewer projects but at least the ones they do fund will be more stable.
If you are a funder, then stop under-funding. Work on understanding the real impact of under-funding and recognise that short term funding that offers no certainty is also part of the problem. Your funding decisions can be actively weakening the very thing you wanted to strengthen. Yes, it’s lovely to fund new things or more things but if that means taking money away from another agency or project then you are also doing harm, so at the very least appreciate what that means, even if that means funding the run-down of projects.
If you are an advice agency, build reserves to ensure that you can retain employees during gaps in funding. Yes, I know this is difficult and I have certainly worked with agencies that would have struggled to build any meaningful reserves, but I have worked with far more that made choices to spend money on other things rather than save some of it to build reserves. Sometimes you have to endure short term pain for longer term stability (though if any of you have seen my personal savings account all I can say is that you should do as I say not as I do).
As managers, be willing to make redundancies where needed in order to better support the remining employees. Fight the urge to try to keep one staff member at the cost of all the others. I’m not saying reach redundancy decisions lightly (God knows I’ve had to reach a few and every one haunts me to this day) and obviously do whatever is reasonable possible to avoid them but if you are sustaining unfunded posts as the cost of properly paying those in funded posts then you have to ask whether that is fair or even conducive to the long term good of your agency and clients. Do also avoid the annual “we’re doomed” announcements as they tend to undermine staff morale and cause people to question whether working in the advice sector is a sensible thing to be doing.
Have a clear and fair salary scale which is benchmarked against the market and built around a near absolute guarantee of annual cost of living increases where inflation increases. Remember that failure to give an inflation linked cost of living increase is a real terms pay cut. What did your staff do to deserve a pay cut?
To do any of this you need to budget pay increases and include those additional costs in your fundraising strategy (and if you have multiple year grants, in the amounts payable by the funders year on year). A funder guaranteeing £50,000 a year for three years to fund a project is basically pretending that costs don’t go up when they patently do. Remember that in every budget there are things that we have no choice but to pay (rent, utilities bills, tax etc.) and there are things over which we do have choice (training fees, books, salaries etc.) and what you need to do is shift salary increases from one mental column called “we have a choice to pay this” to the other called “we have no choice and must pay this”.
Lastly, where you can, offer other employment related benefits like bike loan schemes, paid sabbaticals, funded training etc.. Talk to your staff about what they want and then, if you can, work on finding ways to afford it. This might not happen over-night but then Rome wasn’t built in a day.
As I reach this part of the blog post I can almost hear the people telling me how naive and unrealistic this all is and how I have no idea how difficult the funding environment is. For what it’s worth, yes I do know how difficult the funding environment is and I do understand how difficult some of these issues are but I also know that that’s because the whole funding environment is built on this uncomfortable fiction about how much stuff really costs.
If we want things to get better, then we need to end that fiction and live with the consequences.
As an aside and just as importantly, we also need about another £30million a year coming into the sector. This is what the research I’ve done for the Community Justice Fund has shown in each of the last few years. In response, the Community Justice Fund has just managed to bring in an extra £30 million, about £6 million a year, across 5 years from the National Lottery. It’s not enough but it’s a great start.
But there are other things we can do too. Here’s a list of thoughts that come from looking at this problem across my 15 years of consultancy:
We need to create interesting, exciting and safe workplaces. To do this we need to think about things like:
Having a clear sense of purpose and direction.
Having new and working tech that people are properly trained to use and which makes the day job easier.
Creating a culture of inclusivity, listening, excellence and change and not tolerating poor behaviour and under-performance.
Not setting unrealistic or unexplained targets and being consistent between teams and individuals on the level of input and output expected / required.
Not creating bureaucracy and processes that are unnecessarily burdensome (and yes I’m including you funders here too when you think about reporting).
Looking after staff well-being, including providing support and counselling etc. where needed.
We need to create opportunities for career development by:
Ensuring that there is always training and development available in a planned and structured way and which is designed to achieve developmental goals. If you are confused, the key words in this line are “planned” and “structured” in that they are aimed at creating space for colleagues to develop their careers.
In this regard, don’t assume that development for lawyers (or other technical experts) needs to be hierarchical or into management roles – which can often lead to good lawyers becoming rubbish managers. Remember that the Peter Principle states that people are promoted until they reach a position where they are no longer competent! I’m sure we’ve all met people in that position and I’m pretty sure I’ve been there too.
Thinking about how lawyers can progress outside of becoming a manager – i.e., into strategic litigation; teaching; a judicial post; mentoring others; becoming a campaigner; writing articles and books; or just plain continuing doing what they are doing for more money.
Thinking about sabbaticals; secondment opportunities; external significant training opportunities (MBA’s, masters degrees etc.). On this point, if anyone fancies funding me to go off to the US to research approaches to third sector consultancy then I’ll happy provide my bank details.
We need to plan for succession and create opportunities by:
Upskilling staff in roles performed by colleagues (perhaps by creating deputy or backup positions).
Recruiting internally rather than always externally (where possible and appropriate and not stifling diverse recruitment).
Exposing junior colleagues to meetings and discussions that they wouldn’t normally be part of (whilst being careful not to scare them off…)
Manage poorly performing lifer job blockers (and yes, sorry, there are some) out of the sector.
Lastly, he says increasing the size of the target on his back, let’s stop relishing the workplace poverty. Hair shirts do not mortgages pay. Third sector workers are entitled to be properly paid for the work they do. They are also entitled to their physical work environment being pleasant and not an obstacle course of donated wobbly desks, threadbare chairs, boxes of files and dying spider plants backdropped by out-of-date posters and notices stuck on walls with sun stained 1990’s Sellotape. Thoughtful office design and decoration costs very little but can fundamentally change the atmosphere in an organisation. If this final point doesn’t seem important to you should know that I have been told by many people who chose private practice over non-profit advice centres that they were, of course, put off by salary and job security, but also by the working environments.
So where does this get us? We can fund as many workforce development projects as we like and can window dress this with lots of glitter and bells but unless we can fix salaries and job security and unless we can provide real paths for career development then we are never escaping this crisis. That doesn’t mean that, even without the extra money, there aren’t things that we can do which will make a real difference to our ability to retain and develop your staff.
Now what I discuss above isn’t the whole answer, but I think it’s a goodly part of it. You may have other ideas or have different takes on some of what I have suggested. Feel free to comment. Agree with me, disagree with me, post new ideas. Let’s work out how to solve these problems.
Matthew Howgate FCMI
27th July 2023
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