In my earlier blog on how to attract and retain staff, I noted that there are 5 key factors that I tried to focus on to make work more satisfying for myself and my team, and which will help with attracting and retaining staff. One of these is variety of work.

This is a difficult one to manage, as there is an inherent tension between variety (which most people enjoy) and increasing demands from clients for genuine specialisation and expertise. I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago in Are you straddling in your legal practice? You have to get the balance right, and it will vary from person to person.  Here's my thoughts on how you can do this. 

Focussed variety is the key

I have a strong personal need for variety. Too much of the same stuff and I get bored, quickly. I used to equate the need for variety with a need to do different types of work – corporate, commercial, banking etc. However, where I’ve landed now is that there is plenty of scope for variety within a much more tightly defined focus, where the activities are all different but reinforcing.

Once you have identified that you have a real passion for working with a particular group and type of work, you can much more easily focus in on the type of issues that group has, and how you can help them. It’s a lot easier then to come up with useful content that they will find relevant and interesting, and which you can use to generate leads and client relationships. You can then re-use that content in a wide range of ways to maximise the value you get from your time while also using different skills. For example, you can:

• Write regular blogs
• Use the blogs to create slides for seminars and/or webinars
• Record the seminars/webinars and put them on your website
• Put the slides on slideshare
• Tweet or post about key parts of your content on twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or other social media
• Include summaries or details of your content in your regular newsletter
• Find opportunities to get quoted in the media about the issues you regularly comment on
• Present at conferences
• Have coffees and do other more conventional business development with the warm prospects who are approaching you as a result of all the earlier activity.

All of these types of activities are quite different, involving different skills, so you’re less likely to get bored, but at the same time they are all supporting and reinforcing each other. If you have a team, the tasks can be shared around.

Learn completely new skills too

With all the change that is now starting to affect the profession, you should also be committing some regular time to learning new skills that will be helpful to keep you ahead of the game and able to add more value to your clients. There are a wide range of new skills you may want to learn, as long as they are relevant to where you want to take your practice.

Fortunately it is easier than ever to start learning. Just as you might start generating a wide range of content along the lines above about things your prospective clients want to learn about, others are doing the same thing in their areas, hoping to attract you as a customer. I guarantee you can find a huge amount of free content that others are writing in areas you are interested in.

Beyond that, there are some great online courses available through things like Lynda. If you live in Wellington, this is free via the City library! I only found this out after I bought my subscription, but I’ll know for next year…

I also think it is really valuable to take time to read things from outside the profession. I have a subscription to Harvard Business Review, and also regularly buy business books for my kindle app via Amazon (where the one click purchase is both a blessing and a curse!). Being able to see issues from different perspectives is really useful for understanding what is happening in the legal profession, as I wrote about here after attending a session with a Silicon Valley entrepreneur Gary Bolles.

If you would like to learn more about document automation, and how it could help you work faster and better, be less bored, and create more time for learning or doing other things, please get in touch.

Image-By Adam Jones Adam63, cropped/retouched by User:Dcoetzee - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15482500