Men, women at the top must champion change

Men and women at the top must champion change by influencing attitudes and behaviours from the top down. By implementing this change and putting into place effective frameworks, female employees will have the opportunities and support to thrive.
It is well researched and documented that equality in the workplace not only benefits women, but also has a positive impact on the whole organisation, including financial performance, growth, creativity and innovation.
Research and studies aside, this is something that I wholeheartedly believe in and have experienced first hand throughout my career. I have worked across multiple offices and countries at different stages of economic development, with teams from very different backgrounds, diverse cultures and levels of education and experience, and if there was anything that was consistent across each of these offices, it was that, irrespective of their position, women have made significant contributions in the overall success of the business, they provided unique and vital perspectives, and have contributed to a collaborative and productive working environment.
While running offices in Kiev, Prague and across the UAE, I have observed that the consistent high performers and contributors to the business have often been women. They are highly motivated, ambitious, hard working and adaptable. They balance out a group of like-minded (mostly male) thinkers and bring different perspectives and intuitively approach problems and identify solutions in different ways.
In my experience as a lawyer and managing partner, the commitment to diversity is critical to business success, and the impact of having an increasingly diverse team has been hugely positive. I've found that with a mixed team of women and men, we work better together, morale improves, we have better conversations, we address a broader set of issues and reflect on perspectives we may not have considered otherwise. I think we perform better as an organisation and, ultimately, our clients notice.
Increasingly we see that our clients welcome and expect diverse teams. We've all had the experience where we pitched to a client in a beauty parade for a panel appointment with a male dominated team, whilst the decision makers and representatives on the client side who interviewed us were mostly women, or at least had a more balanced team from a gender perspective. That's not a comfortable place to be. Clients want to know that we genuinely embrace diversity in all its dimensions and they want us to share their goals on gender diversity and diversity more broadly.
We also know that a genuine commitment to a diverse team drives our ability to recruit and retain top talent. Candidates we interview, particularly high performing women, ask about our commitment to diversity when considering our firm. I have had conversations with leading Emirati women in decision making positions in the UAE who, when considering working with our Firm as a business partner, have appropriately inquired about how many women we have in senior leadership positions across our Firm. The bottom line is that diversity is not only good in its own right, it's good for business.
Notwithstanding all the benefits of having a diverse team of professionals in the organisation, we have to acknowledge that the legal profession as a whole (as is the case with many professional services firms) is still male dominated.
So how can we bring about change?
We men have an important role in championing change and opening doors for women in order to ensure they have genuinely equal opportunities.
If men are at the top and they are the gatekeepers to career advancement, then those very men need to become mentors and sponsors. They are the ones who need to champion and support women to ensure they get the same right of audience as other men. It is widely known that having a mentor or sponsor (whether or not they work in your organisation) makes a huge difference in the progression of women's careers.
Institutionally, we also need to ensure that our organisations embrace flexible working arrangements that allow women to flourish and afford them the opportunity to balance work with family commitments if they choose to do so. The rigid working day where everyone is expected to work out of the same office space, at the same time, for the same number of hours, needs to be scrapped for a flexible working environment that recognises that our professionals can contribute and work efficiently in different ways to accommodate other life needs that are equally, or more, important.
The legal profession has made great strides in the last two decades, with firms like Baker McKenzie leading the way. On a global level, our firm recognised that diversity was a critical business issue, not a women's issue, and made a determined commitment to improving diversity and inclusion some years ago.
The writer is co-managing partner, Baker McKenzie Habib Al Mulla. Views expressed are his own and do not reflect the newspaper's policy.