Calling all Associates, Analysts and Consultants. If you were to become a Partner in your respective firms, what one realistic policy decision will you make to improve WLB for your staff?

likehelpfulsmart
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Require first, second, and where possible third line managers (so at McK, EM/ED/partner) to agree on a rough sketch of the output before asking frontline staff to begin work. I waste 25-40% of my time redoing work because someone in the chain of command wasn’t on board or wasn’t consulted before work began. Like today: EM and I brought a document to ED. ED says the story is all wrong, need to frame it differently, so we go back and redo it. I understand that alignment isn’t always possible and sometimes things change. That’s ok. But we could avoid 50%+ of the rework if we just proactively agreed on outputs before work begins. Would save me maybe 5-10 hours per week on average and make a huge difference in WLB.

likehelpfulsmart

I cannot relate to this.

My most honest assessment would be that excessive work has more to do with team inexperience / weak pyramid. This is normally due to poor staffing decisions / limited availability in busy times / or insufficient project budget (or a mix of the 3)

I personally don’t see partners as entropy generators.

Reduce each employee’s utilization target hours by the # of PTO hours he or she accrues.

Taking your accrued PTO shouldn’t impact your utilization.

likehelpfulsmart

I love this at West Monroe ^

Recent IconRecent

We have more automation now than ever and resources across the globe that work as part of our teams so we basically have a 24 hour roster.

Stop creating work just to keep people online. If we left our firms and went out on our own as independent consultants we’d charge by delivery, not the hours worked. If I can get the work done in 30 hours, stop creating meaningless work just to keep us around.

Our salaries broken up by hours worked is horrific.

Basically, use is as gig workers.

likehelpfulsmart

P4. If the bonus for high utilization is legitimate then that’s fine but when the partners are selling fixed fee projects where we can only charge 8 or 9 hours a day but are working 17 hours to get it done in the allotted time with the allotted resources, please explain how to fix this?

No meetings past 6pm and no weekends 🥺

likesmarthelpful

I am a senior manager and this is my life. Wanted to say it for anyone who said it's not realistic.

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Respect people’s vacation request and vacation time

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Thanks everyone in participating this discussion. This is very helpful for me as a Partner in my firm (hopefully other leaders who read these posts) to understand what we could be doing differently to make things better for our staff. Here are the most liked/discussed topics. While most of them are not surprising, it’s very interesting to see the #1 in this list as the biggest issue.

1. Involve early in the deliverable development process to avoid rework. Don’t micromanage but provide necessary guidance during the ideation phase etc.

2. Respect weekends and evenings personal time. If unavoidable, make sure to give early notice to make it easier for them.

3. Don’t make your staff eat up extra hours. Help them to get the utilization credit helping them with promotions, bonuses and pay raises.

4. Lead by example (WLB ) and enforce/insist this culture throughout the team.

likeupliftinghelpfulfunny

Thank you for the clarification

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That question needs to back up a step or two

As it stands, there is no partnership for people who value WLB. You have to work ridiculous hours, vacations and holidays, So if you want to sell WLB at lower levels while expecting the reverse from them to progress in the career , no policy is going to be effective.

likesmart

EY2 hits the nail on the head. I’ve stopped engaging in these discussions at my firm. I do what I can for my teams but I’m not wasting time with policies to improve WLB. Personally, I’ll stick it out until I can’t anymore, probably when we have kid #2. It’s just not worth it.

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-hold upper management to milestones the same way you would hold staff
-stop asking people to perform 1-2 levels above their pay grade and present it as a “learning opportunity”

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You explained the unexplainable

funny

Push back the start time of projects if we don't have staffing available (and accept that we'll lose some projects as a result)

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ZS - you probably don’t know this coming in as an MBA hire but you CAN and SHOULD say no if you cannot be staffed due to time constraints. You are in charge of your destiny at ZS. I empower my A and AC and even Cs to never be “surprise staffed” and even as an AC and C, I had the power to figure out my own staffing.

WLB goes downhill if the scope of work >> consultants staffed. One realistic thing could be a metric to track the balance?

likefunny

Yep problem at my firm too. Happens when we competitively sell engagements and need to cut somewhere to have a margin

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Compensation partly affected by a proxy (e.g. team health scores). Believe Bain implemented something like this?

likesmart

We did it a long time ago. Helps! NA office and I average about 52 hrs / week over the last 4 years. Partners step in when burn gets high.

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None, i suffered and so will you

funnylikeuplifting

^ I was in investment banking before my MBA. There are definitely a ton of people who legitimately have this attitude, and it’s the number 1 reason that industry is miserable. There’s really no need to keep your staff at the office a minimum of 80 hours a week even when they only have 40 hours of work to do now - if stuff comes up late at night, they can be checking emails from home. But because that’s how it used to be, senior leadership keeps those policies intact.

4 day work week

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Yep, read some articles about the success and I won't argue with it. However, the question pertains to work life balance. You achieve great WLB on a 4 day work week but I will not take a 20% pay cut if that is on the table.

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Lead by example. Although I’m in Europe and there’s a different work culture and comparatively lower hours (vs US), we still work long hours, sometimes for no reason.

No matter what the firm or SLT says about WLB on all hands/town halls, if the most senior person is in the office late then all other subordinate staff feel compelled to stay whether they need to or not and whether you expect them to or not (pre COVID)

If I need to do more work I’d go home and work from there and explicitly tell my team to go home. Everyone accepts working late before a deadline but if there’s no need, I’d tell my team to leave early. That occasional half day even at the end of a long project makes a huge difference even if you’ve worked late for 6 months straight. Or being told to start later because I worked until 2-3am.

You can’t change WLB for a whole firm but you can make a direct impact on a smaller number of people who will really appreciate it and will go the extra mile for you in return.

We seem to associate hours with productivity but the SLT I’ve worked for who implement these small things have had some of the best client feedback and a happier, healthier team

likesmart

Adopt lower level staff and make it a point to come home for dinner to show them I truly care

likefunny

Track non-billed hours worked. Don’t penalize junior resources for sitting on the bench only to then not allow them to bill actuals...or atleast track them so you know how much they are working.

likehelpful

So true, utilization at my own firm isn't really a measure of how many hours you worked but more of a measure of how much of the year you were on a project, since the only way to break 40 hours billable is to be on multiple engagements at a time and bill both above 50%. I've eaten hours on every project that I've been on in my 5 years with the firm.

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Reduce the amount of rework by looping in senior leadership earlier in the process. It doesn’t have to be onerous - 15 min quick check in each day with PPMDs where they review WIP deliverables, and course correct, instead of grinding on days on deliverables that middle managers seem to think partners want, only to have it scrapped. The attitude of “always having something client ready for partners to review” has to go.

It’s not just about time saved, it’s about a sense of purpose knowing that what you do is less likely to be thrown out.

likesmart

And to be clear, as a junior staff I know my place, and I give 100% in my work. Ultimately partners aren’t there to spoon feed you, so there’s some level of work that has to be “presented” versus “co-designed”, per se. But there’s a balance and I’ve faced shitty managers who try too hard to impress and end up screwing over those below them.

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Travelling flexibility.

More Tuesday-Thursday weeks and remote weeks as project demands dictate

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I know that’s definitely the case for me

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Bind partner compensation to WLB. In our case (non-equity partners) they make more the slimmer the team.

Not sure how this works when there’s equity involved.

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Not at OW. I can tell you we take staff satisfaction and retention very seriously. Along with revenue, margin, and cash management these are our metrics.

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Take a look at hours logged onto company computer vs hours billed.. that should be telling enough

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