Lawyers are worse off in health terms than any other white collar profession, according to a new report from an Australian psychological counselling service.
PsychSafe’s report puts the blame on high stress levels, following its survey of over 800 white collar professionals, almost half of whom were lawyers from in-house law, barristers and law firms.
It is an issue reported on by LawFuel regularly (See: “Why Do Lawyers Fall Victim to Depression“)
The report places the blame on a number of factors including:
- Overtime and high pressure
- Strenuous workloads
- Toxic workplace behaviour
And the report also confirms the level of alcohol and drug abuse among lawyers, which is almost twice the level found in other professional groups.
These findings should not be of great surprise in New Zealand where similar studies show depression, mental health issues and substance abuse to be high among the legal profession.
“From a risk perspective, it’s after the fact – much like relying on a fire blanket, rather than preventing the fire in the first place,” Michalak told the Australian Financial Review.
“We seriously need to step away from the resilience cookie jar and move towards primary prevention strategies to address causes of poor mental health and wellbeing, which include work environment factors.”
Harassment in law firms is also reportedly high, with the study showing that lawyers are three times as likely to resign after being badly treated at work. In many cases, harassment remained unreported. Many victims who did raise concerns often faced more negative experiences as a consequence of reporting such behaviour.
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“Factors including an unethical climate in the workplace, destructive leadership styles and poor human resources policies and practices are also affecting organisational culture as well as job performance, satisfaction and commitment,” the report found.
Key Findings and Recommendations
Among the Report’s discussion points and recommendations are included throughout the report, and include but are not limited to:
Employers, particularly private practice law firms, need to pay increased attention to organisational context characteristics that negatively relate to employee wellbeing and job performance, rather than focussing on the individual employee;
Managers and human resource professionals should monitor employee attitudes, wellbeing and all five job performance components including organisational citizenship behaviour, deviant behaviour, joining and staying with the organisation, and maintaining work attendance (absenteeism and presenteeism), rather than focussing on task performance, to, amongst other purposes, assist in identifying trends and changes that may indicate exposure to work-related psychosocial risks;
Given the poor wellbeing levels suffered by private practice lawyers, prior to being granted a Principal Practicing Certificate law firm principals should be required to complete a compulsory Practice Management course covering (as a minimum) positive leadership styles, creating and maintaining positive organisational contexts, developing and implementing formalisation practices, strategic human resources management principles, appropriate use of power, occupational health and safety requirements, and psychosocial risk management;
A compulsory up-skilling course of the same content should be completed by existing Principals as a matter of urgency;
In line with the nationally legislated requirement to provide a psychologically safe working environment, employers need to develop, implement and evaluate detailed psychosocial risk management plans;
To assist in effectively identifying, managing and assisting employees at risk of and/or suffering a mental health issue, all workplaces would benefit from employing qualified mental health first aiders;
Employers in general need to move towards primary risk management strategies for poor interpersonal behaviour and other work-related psychosocial risks, rather than relying on secondary and tertiary (post-exposure to risk) interventions such as engaging in mindfulness practices and developing employee resilience;
Managers and human resource professionals need to develop appropriate mechanisms to both encourage reporting of poor interpersonal behaviour between employees, to ensure reports are managed in a just manner, and to prevent further social and work-related victimisation of targets who engage in voicing behaviours;
Law societies and other relevant legal profession bodies should incorporate executive level commitment to and action on employee mental health and wellbeing as a key strategic imperative when determining firm-level and individual award recipients, for example by including mental health and wellbeing as prerequisite criteria for all ‘employer-of-choice’ awards, including but not limited to a requirement to produce evidence of positive organisational context and proactive psychosocial risk management strategies; and
There is a need for continued, extended, and more valid, reliable and empirical efforts to research work-related causal factors for mental health and wellbeing issues in employees, especially private practice lawyers. Endeavours have been made to include report content meeting the inform
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