The mental health spotlight has been shining very brightly of late on a ‘toxic’ legal sector working culture, with firms being challenged to provide a healthier working environment for their people.
This signals a timely shift in the narrative from individual weakness to one of corporate responsibility. The SRA’s thematic review of workplace culture suggests that lawyer wellbeing correlates strongly with working in teams, departments and firms in which it is psychologically safe to speak up. The idea of psychological safety at work is not new, going back at least to the 1990s. It was reinforced a decade ago when Google named it as the number 1 requirement of successful teams in its Project Aristotle research study.
