Why You Should Let Your Employees Set Their Own Hours

By Jonathan Levitt

Allowing your employees to set their own hours can provide a huge competitive advantage for your business and directly improve your bottom line. I realize this may sound crazy, but consider the benefits of empowering your team with such flexibility.

Employees are happier, more productive, and incredibly loyal when they're able to achieve a reasonable work-life balance, and in turn, a positive workplace culture will help your business stand out among its competitors.

I learned to appreciate the value of flexibility firsthand during my early experience as an associate in a big law firm, where unrealistic billable hour targets and bureaucratic pressures left many attorneys feeling dissatisfied with their careers, and caused many of the best lawyers–especially those with families–to leave the firm.

Later, as general counsel for several technology companies, I encountered more of the same general unhappiness, and realized that workplace success always seemed to come at the expense of other important life connections.

Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Flexibility

When considering the possibility of starting my own company, the promise of flexibility was a critical factor in my decision-making. I knew that I also wanted others on my team to share in the same benefits I would enjoy as the founder: time to devote to non-work passions, while still enjoying a professionally satisfying, financially successful career.

However, what I didn’t fully appreciate at that time was how this commitment, which I shared with my co-founder and business partner Bill Stone, would provide us with a key differentiator in the marketplace, one that has contributed significantly to our bottom line and overall success.

When Bill and I co-founded Outside GC in 2002, our mission was to create a new type of offering for legal services. To us, the traditional approach to legal services delivery was broken: too expensive, too slow, and lacking in the solution-driven approach to problem solving that clients expect from their advisors.

So we created a team of experienced lawyers with extensive in-house experience to serve as part-time general counsel to our clients, all at a fraction of the cost of engaging a traditional law firm or hiring a full-time in-house counsel.

Allow Employees to Define Their Own Work Experience

While a big part of our thinking was customer-driven (meaning: “What service do our customers really need that isn’t currently available in the market?”), we focused at least as much of our energy on providing a unique opportunity to the lawyers who would make up our team. Specifically, all of our lawyers work from home, decide how much or how little they want to work, and choose their own projects.

This ability to define their own experience has been a huge draw for our attorneys. In fact, we have attracted dozens of incredibly talented, dedicated lawyers, many at the pinnacle of their careers, in large part due to this model.

Jordan Karp, a member of our team, notes, “This arrangement was exactly what I was looking for–an opportunity to work with like-minded colleagues on highly sophisticated legal matters, while controlling my own schedule.”

On the client side, rather than this being a negative, we often hear from clients about how much they appreciate working with rock star lawyers who are also interesting, well-balanced individuals, and deliver extraordinary service because they recognize and value the unique opportunity made possible by Outside GC. The longstanding relationships we have with many of our clients are certainly a testament to the success of our business model.

Today, we have nearly 50 lawyers on the team, in four geographic markets, and well over 500 clients across a broad range of industries. I believe we never would have achieved this success without our ongoing commitment to providing our team with the flexibility to make their own schedules and define their own work cadence. We built this culture from within our company, and you can too.