2.2 Perceptions of conflicting priorities
It has already been noted that wellbeing was traditionally disregarded and stigmatised in legal workplaces. These attitudes still remain in some parts of the legal profession. For example, there are still concerns that an over-emphasis on wellbeing could be damaging to other aspects of legal practice:
I think, to be honest, there's always some concern I would say at a senior level that when you start talking about wellbeing, people are going to start saying ‘my target is too stretching’, you know, ‘the hours are too long’. And I think particularly at senior level, people have come up through the ranks, you know, and felt like this is what law is, this is how it's always been, this is how it always will be.
This attitude is largely based on a lack of understanding over how enhancing wellbeing can also benefit productivity, performance and other important metrics in many legal workplaces. Indeed, several individuals and organisations have begun to emphasise the wider benefits of promoting wellbeing (MBC, 2025; Reich, 2020).
When I think about well-being for lawyers, it’s very much around their performance and their productivity and the links it has to ethical behaviour.
... if people don't care the staff turnover is huge.
It may be possible to identify at least some of these benefits by utilising data collected by your workplace, for example, on levels of sickness leave relating to mental health and wellbeing, or on connections between high levels of work intensity and individuals’ experiences of burnout. More broadly, it is important to advocate for wellbeing as part of the core business of your organisation, rather than as something which is an ‘optional extra’.
Activity 2 Understanding your workplace context
Answer the following questions based on your perceptions of your workplace.
Discussion
Your answers to the questions above will help you assess your starting point when trying to improve workplace wellbeing. For example, it may be that your workplace does not yet acknowledge wellbeing-related issues. In that case, your overall goal may be to educate leaders and managers on the relevance and importance of wellbeing, setting out a ‘business case’ to prioritise it.
Conversely, your workplace may state that it prioritises wellbeing, but you may feel it is not doing so in reality. If this is the case, your overall goal may be to obtain recognition of this gap and implement practical wellbeing-related measures to address it.
If your workplace is genuinely prioritising wellbeing, it is valuable to consider whether they have fully engaged with the experience of their employees and are aware of the key challenges being faced. If not, it may be that your overall goal is to collect sufficient data to obtain a full understanding of the challenges your colleagues are experiencing. For example, are their differences between particular staff groups (e.g. seniority, professional focus) or demographic groups (gender, age, ethnicity, disability, parental status) that need further attention.
If there is already a sound understanding of these challenges, then it is important to explore whether they are being responded to proactively, in a strategic fashion. If the current approach is retroactive, tackling crises as they arise, this suggests your overall goal may need to be creating and implementing a clear Wellbeing Policy and Strategy to avoid so many crises arising in the first place.
If your workplace has a well-developed Wellbeing Policy and Strategy, your goal may be to ensure this is being evaluated in a way which will demonstrate its impacts and enable changes and adjustments to be made where necessary.
When you have considered the questions above, make some notes in your ‘theory of change’ record about what stage your organisation is currently at in addressing workplace wellbeing and how this might influence the overall goal for your work.
Next, go to 3 Equipping yourself to support the wellbeing of others [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .
2.1 Critique of common workplace wellbeing interventions