How are legal department leaders managing in a crisis?

*** The following article is linked to CANLIF’s ongoing webinar series as well as our CANLIF 2021 Legal Department Survey & Report.

You can learn more and participate in the survey here: https://www.canlif.net/content/ihcsurvey ***

By Jennifer Brown, Editorial Consultant, ADB Insights

Managing the fluidity of a crisis

Responding to a crisis is something in-house counsel are prepared to do on a daily basis. In the risk manager and trusted advisor's role, lawyers are generally ready to lead through difficult challenges when their knowledge of the law and analytical thinking makes them ideal team players.

However, the pandemic has been a very different challenge, requiring in-house counsel to adjust to the same, evolving crisis as a sustained event. No past experience or pandemic plan sitting on a shelf or stored on a computer prepared them for what was about to unfold in March 2020. While there has been an ebb and flow of events to manage both internally and externally over the last 11 months, the reality is the risk profile has been affected by uncertainty.

Many questions arose for organizations around COVID-19 restrictions and regulations that were not applied evenly across the country. Differing masking policies from province to province created disparities. How staff conducted themselves when away from the job suddenly had implications for co-workers in the office.

Cheryl Foy, University Secretary + General Counsel, Ontario Tech University

At some point, for many organizations, there was a realization that things were changing not just for a few months but for the long-term and perhaps forever.

“You start to think, how does this affect us on a permanent basis? Now we’re thinking about what does means for the new normal?” says Cheryl Foy, general counsel at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa, Ont., who has helped guide her team through many challenges, including staff layoffs, privacy concerns of students migrating almost entirely online and the safety of the university’s 10,000+ students and 2,000+ staff and faculty.

The impact of COVID-19 has introduced many new questions for in-house counsel around crisis management and risk mitigation. With so many employees working from their homes, others have been required to show up at the office every day with the fear of infection in the back of their minds.

Managing and mitigating the emerging risks throughout the pandemic has been like running a marathon for many lawyers in-house. The boundaries between work and home were not just blurred but wiped out entirely in some cases.

“I would say the role hasn’t really changed, but the questions have been different, and the volume and magnitude of what we have been asked to do was much different,” says Foy.

Without the time spent commuting to the office, Foy says she turned to exercise to stay mentally strong and to create some definition between home and work life during the pandemic.

Managing burnout and fatigue 

In addition to finding ways to manage their stress during the crisis, in-house counsel has been acutely aware of how the pandemic affects the broader workforce.

During a CANLIF webinar last fall, Gennady Ferenbok, vice-president, general counsel and secretary of Coca-Cola Canada Bottling, talked about what he saw as the growing impact of mental health struggles emerging in organizations.

As Ferenbok said, “Crises are generally acute, sudden and have a massive potential impact.” The pandemic has been a prolonged event no one thought would last this long. Coca Cola Bottling has 6,000 employees in Canada with 500 office workers, five production facilities in Canada, and 60 locations. Managing the risks involved with workers who continue to be in the facilities is constant.

“It’s fluid to this day,” said Ferenbok. “Our protocols are always changing. If the government changes its directive or learns more about COVID, we change our protocols.”

Communication on a different level

Gennady Ferenbok, VP, Secretary + General Counsel, Coca-Cola Canada Bottling

There’s also the need to be crystal clear and empathetic with employee communication and reinforcing messaging at all opportunities.

“As a company, our communication has gone through the roof. We reach out to our employee base much more frequently than we used to. There are updates and townhalls — a lot more formal communication than there was before to make people feel less isolated.”

“While COVID was a crisis initially, here we are 10 months later, and I’m not sure it’s a crisis anymore, but we still manage it through our incident management team, and that’s a cross functional team,” said Ferenbok.

That team had been planning for COVID since January 2020, but the advanced planning was much more theoretical. “We didn’t expect it to hit as quickly as it did. Even though we had been planning for a number of months, we needed to reconvene and dedicate all of our time to reacting,” he said.

Ferenbok added that the bottler is being formal about check-ins to make sure no one is left behind.

David Bennett, Chief of Legal Operations, Government of British Columbia

Managing the impact on people 

Many organizations are now dealing with fatigue in their ranks. Addressing burnout is becoming a real concern, and making sure there is balance in people’s lives has been part of the equation for teams' long-term sustainability.

As lockdowns, stay at home orders, and other measures resumed in the late fall of 2020, the reality that there was no longer a boundary between the job and home had sunk in. People need to be reminded to take their vacation, and the team needs to understand that they are off even when they are very likely just at home.

Risk mitigation around people isn’t just physical safety related to COVID-19, but wellness, as David Bennett, chief of legal operations at the Government of British Columbia, outlined during the Western Legal Innovation Forum last fall.

“Working in this environment, even as we become more used to it, has a strain we sometimes don’t identify. It requires us to be more thoughtful and mindful with how we deal with each other and how we deal with the employees reporting to us, and how we communicate our plans and be transparent,” said Bennett. “It’s really important right now to help people understand what we’re trying to do and give them the comfort of the decisions we are making.”

Recognizing the need for talent development 

Bennett said the crisis has also raised a focus on succession planning and skills sets. When the pandemic hit, some areas of work in the legal department slowed down, and for others, it heated up. He realized there was considerable knowledge being held in a small group of people.

“We are working now to make sure future planning includes knowledge sharing and succession planning,” he said. 

Risk mitigation and management have always been in the job description of in-house counsel; the pandemic has only reinforced their ability to sustain an organization through a crisis and bring it to the other side even stronger than before.

 *** The following article is linked to CANLIF’s ongoing webinar series as well as our CANLIF 2021 Legal Department Survey & Report.

You can learn more and participate in the survey here: https://www.canlif.net/content/ihcsurvey ***