Recently International Workers’ Day was celebrated across the world, but not in the US. While in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, workers’ day is celebrated (on May 1st), labor day is celebrated in the US (on the first Monday of September).
The differences are immense. One celebrates the person, and the other the activity. Without getting into any political or moral discussions, this highlights the culture of glorified work that exists today in the US.
The eight-hour workday was created during the Industrial Revolution, after factory workers started to riot against 10-16-hour workdays in Chicago. The day was divided into “eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.”
But this eight-hour moment didn’t become mainstream until in 1914, Ford Motor Company decided to cut the daily hours down to eight while doubling wages for workers. To everyone’s surprise, this increased productivity.
Today, a new movement arises: Should we cut the eight-hour, five-day-per-week work schedules even further? With the advances in technology, is working all these hours even necessary?
Your Employees Aren’t Probably Working As Much As You Think
The truth is that most humans cannot concentrate for 8 hours per day. According to field studies, the average worker is only productive for two hours and 53 minutes per day.
That means only about 3 hours per day are devoted to meaningful work. The rest are spent checking emails, browsing social media, discussing non-work-related things with co-workers, taking breaks, researching, and making calls.
This means that your employees aren’t probably working as much as you think, which is great because it means they can still get a lot done with just a few hours each day. What is hard is realizing that you are likely overpaying for full-time employees, which impacts your clients because you need to raise prices just to stay profitable.
It is not that your employees are ‘bad’ or have dishonest intentions. Just like them, we probably only have 3 hours every day to do truly productive work. So what should we do, given this reality?
The New Way To Work
What people are realizing is that there are smarter ways to work. If we trim everything in our workdays that isn’t our core functions (such as emails, managing social media, answering calls, etc), we are left with just a handful of tasks that are within our zone of genius. These are the tasks where we can have the most impact, that we enjoy the most, and what ultimately we get paid for.
This is why at Amata we created Fractional Support Services. Most small law firms will not need a full-time paralegal, virtual assistant, and on-site administrative staff. What they need are flexible packages that allow them to hire support on demand (hourly), so that their in-house team can focus on their core responsibilities and become more productive.
Some of the benefits of hiring fractional (part-time) support are:
- Save 60% compared to a full-time employee
- Take mundane tasks off your daily to-do list
- Spend more time working with your clients
- Work with a team to support your practice, not just one or two employees
- No more time or money spent recruiting
- Zero employee benefits costs
- Scale team up for busy periods, scale down when done
- No more payroll to cover during slow periods
- Get expertise to help organize your days and reduce the anxiety created when you feel under pressure
- Make more client deadlines without sacrificing work/life balance
- Make time to take on more clients
This removes the bottleneck on your operational needs while maintaining flexibility on costs. You can scale up and down without needing to pay for full-time employees, so your full-time associates and key employees can do the most profitable work that they love doing.
You don’t need a large hiring budget to get operational support for your law firm. With Amata’s new Fractional Support Services, you can hire the specific help you need at affordable rates, and only pay hours actually worked.
Click here to learn more about the different packages we offer!