Einstein once famously said that the definition of insanity was to keep doing the same thing repeatedly and expect a different result.
If that’s the case, the majority of conveyancers risk being labelled crazy because of our commitment to continuing to work the way we have always done while hoping that maybe next month, things will calm down a bit and we’ll be able to catch our breath.
There are some key cultural reasons why the workload for conveyancers has significantly increased over the past five years – and it’s got nothing to do with the personal diligence or commitment of conveyancers.
Rather, changing client expectations created by the adoption of technology across all aspects of our lives has made us increasingly impatient as a society with structures and processes that seem confusing, opaque and slow. If I can see every step of my $20 pizza being made and delivered, surely it’s not unreasonable to expect a similar service when settling a property that is the most expensive thing I will ever buy in my life, right?
Wrong!
With conveyancers relying on phone, email and paper based processes as the primary tools to deliver our services, it places extraordinary stress on our people to personally try to meet these client expectations.
The result is days, weeks and months feeling like we are constantly chasing our tails always communicating or missing calls with clients, and driven by a constant adrenalin rush that pricks every time we fear a dropped ball between parties, a missed detail or an error that causes a settlement delay.
We demand excellence from ourselves – ALL the time – because the tools that we use to do our job are no longer fit for purpose. And when things don’t work as intended we simply work harder and longer hours to fix it until we find that we are always in the office. (With the occasional bout of crying at your desk or in a toilet cubicle).
If this sounds like you, you are not alone. Preliminary results of new research from Realtime Conveyancer show that 72% of conveyancers say dealing with stress is one of the biggest challenges in the industry.
And this has big ramifications for us as an industry because 34% state that finding and retaining staff is becoming harder and harder with 17% looking to leave the industry and a further 14% saying they are affected by burnout.
Yet when faced with so many compelling and essential reasons for change, the response from so many conveyancers is that they just simply don’t have the time. Maybe next month, next quarter or next year when things are not so – you guessed it – busy.
Hoping things will calm down enough to give you the bandwidth you need to adopt tools and processes that will genuinely give you back time, reduce stress and support workflows that let you and your staff commit to something closer to a 38-hour week is not a strategy.
Instead, we should identify technology that will be a genuine game changer for our businesses, intentionally plan our next move, set a timeline, make sure we have a supportive and patient and technical team behind us and carve out time for training and adoption. (It’s rarely as hard as we fear).
You don’t have to be a genius to realise that anything else is just crazy.
If work is always mad for you and your team, it’s time for change and we’d love to help.
Book a demo to see how Realtime Conveyancer can help you and your team get your lives back.