Wellbeing

At A&O Shearman, we promote positive wellbeing and foster a healthy workplace culture. Being part of a high-performance culture is rewarding, we engage in inspiring and challenging work, give our best, and deliver high-quality results. 

Basketball passing through hoop with multiple hands reaching upward against clear sky, viewed from below.

Wellbeing is essential to sustaining high-performance, and you need to be at your best to feel fulfilled at work.

But it’s about more than the work we do. It’s about ensuring the right degree of rest and recuperation, reducing unnecessary stress, and making the time we spend with each other motivating. It’s about encouraging our people to bring their whole selves to work. And it’s about creating networks where they can find a sense of community. 

We provide guidance to help our people look after themselves and their colleagues, and comprehensive support and early intervention strategies to help them to avoid reaching crisis. 

We encourage open conversations 

We have 40+ mental health advocates made up of partners and senior business services professionals across our global network. Their role is to champion working practices that support positive wellbeing, promote local wellbeing initiatives, and encourage everyone to speak openly about their wellbeing, so we can normalize the conversation, and our people can seek help with confidence. 

And we have more than 300 mental health allies worldwide who have been trained to support colleagues and point them towards the many wellbeing resources available to them. 

All employees and partners globally, have access to mental health awareness training and support, and we track and encourage time spent on wellbeing initiatives.

Our global wellbeing advisory board - a group of partners who help to shape our wellbeing strategy - influence our leaders and report on progress against our wellbeing aims.  

A happy and fulfilled team is an effective one

We want to have a positive influence on wellbeing outside of our four walls, so we’ve worked with the Mindful Business Charter to create a set of transaction guidelines which provide guidance on conducting transactions in a mindful manner. We also run events and workshops with clients to help them to integrate wellbeing into their ways of working.

External partnerships and recognition

Signatories

Partnerships

Awards and accreditations

Signatories

We are signatories of:

  • The Mindful Business Charter, which intends to remove unnecessary sources of stress and promote better mental health and wellbeing in the workplace.
  • The ABA Wellbeing pledge, which was launched to improve the substance use and mental health landscape of the legal profession, with an emphasis on helping legal employers support a  healthy and sustainable work environment. The pledge calls on legal employers to: (a) recognize that substance use and mental health problems represent a significant challenge for the legal profession and acknowledge that more can and should be done to improve the health and well-being of those in the legal community (including judges, lawyers, staff, and students); and (b) support and prioritize the pledge’s framework for building a better future.
  • The MindForward Alliance Leadership Pledge (in partnership with the Global Business Collaboration for Better Workplace Mental Health). The Leadership Pledge is a public commitment, by businesses globally, to build mentally healthy workplaces. It enables organizations and their leaders to demonstrate that they are prioritizing mental health in the workplace.
Wellbeing