Bird & Bird Law Firm is one of the leading law firms in Finland and throughout the world. The work of lawyers, as well as the support staff surrounding them, is often demanding, precise and can take time time from the rest of everyday life, because customer service work is often flexible according to customers' needs. One of Bird & Bird's main themes is to offer its employees different opportunities to combine family life and work life in different ways, so that neither of them suffers because of the other.
Bird & Bird's Helsinki office has several employees who, for example, after starting a family switched to working 3 or 4 days a week. One of them is Päivi, who works in HR, which tells about the possibilities offered by Bird & Bird as follows:
"I have had good experiences combining work and family. The employer is flexible and enabled part-time work when the child was small. My supervisor has taken my situation into account and the restrictions brought by the nursery care hours. Remote work also enables flexibility. I feel that the most important enabler is the support of the supervisor and the team. Flexibility works both ways.
I also appreciate the care service for a sick child offered by the employer. Although the service in question does not come to be used very often so just knowing that it is possible is great. In an international company, there may sometimes be meetings at unusual times for Finns, but with good foresight and planning they are possible. Of course also self-management skills have been emphasized in coordinating work and family life. I see that so be it family or something else that is important to you, e.g. a hobby or pets, so coordination is very possible!''
As Päivi mentions, Bird & Bird offers many different options and career assistance for planning, which is a positive thing for the employees and the company. The possibility of part-time work has collected a lot of positive feedback in our work environment, because especially for lawyers, it may be considered a difficult equation to implement.
HR Manager Maija Fast says that Bird & Bird has several lawyers, assistants and business services staff, who have chosen to return from parental leave initially part-time. This is well received to act in all roles, although it can sometimes cause pressure when dealing with customer requests that may come even at unusual times.
Fast also says that more and more fathers are taking longer paternity leaves than before and this is what we wanted to encourage by the fact that both fathers and mothers get four months of paid leave. Considering family life as a normal part of an employee's life is particularly important, because it helps the employee to cope better in general and thus also perform the work tasks better. Family and the rest of life is important to people, and the better the different areas of life can be maintained, the better people feel, which is beneficial for both the employee and the employer.
Bird & Bird is one of Finland's leading law firms that offers comprehensive business legal services under one roof. Bird & Bird is MiB's Trusted Partner.
Mothers in Business (MiB) is an organization for all mothers who are interested in their career. MiB's goal is an equal and family-friendly working life. Every year, we organize hundreds of events in different parts of Finland that develop professional skills and increase well-being. The group of more than 4,000 MiB mothers guarantees peer support and the growth of valuable networks.
