The case for job shares

Sara Allen is on a mission to raise awareness about the benefits of job shares for both employees and employers.

Sara left her high-level job in Whitehall 18 months ago to start up job share firm Further&More. Before leaving she did extensive research talking to failed and successful job sharers and managers and then began speaking to potential clients.

She was driven in part by her own experience of working “crazy hours”. “I couldn’t juggle work and home,” she says. She considered a job share, but she found it hard to find the right person to share with. Whitehall has been an enthusiastic adopter of job shares and Sara was well aware of the huge appetite among its employees for working reduced hours. She was also meeting so many mums at the school gate who “used to be a senior executive”. “I felt job sharing was an important part of the jigsaw and the future of work, but was the most marginal,” she says.

Sara says one of the big barriers to job sharing is that people feel that they cannot ask to reduce their hours without it affecting perceptions about their career trajectory. Some 92% questioned in a survey Further&More did of hundreds of workers said this. It’s something women have struggled with for years and Sara says that unless people can work reduced hours and still progress their career there will always be low take-up of job shares.

No brainer

She thinks job shares are a no brainer for both employer and employee. For employees they mean they can do a senior job on reduced hours; for employers they get full-time cover and more than full-time expertise and productivity.

Further&More is talking to lots of multinationals and a growing number of NGOs and SMEs. “At the most senior levels there is not really any resistance,” she says. “The door is open.”

Her site has an online matching mechanism to achieve the best possible match. It also offers advice on what works in job shares, including checklists about holidays, handovers and so on. “We have created the mother of all guidebooks for job shares,” says Sara. The company also provides coaches who sit down with job shares and help them prepare and decide how they want the job share to work. Sara says most job shares take between six and nine months to bed in. Handovers are vital, she states, but some employers, particularly SMEs, are worried about paying extra for an overlapping day. She says it can be half a day or less and the time can be covered by letting job shares leave early on other days.

While economics is sometimes a barrier to job shares, Sara is adamant they are cost effective because employers save on recruitment to cover a person who leaves because they can’t get reduced hours, they don’t lose out on any investment they have made in that person’s training and they retain the person’s organisational knowledge. Also because job shares are more likely to be women, the chances are that two female jobs shares will earn less than one full-time man. In addition, they increase diversity, which has been shown to be good for a business’ bottom line, increase innovation [two heads being better than one] and coach each other as well as transferring skills between each other.

They also require less management time, she says, because they solve problems together. “Our research shows that the best job share pairs have an interesting range of experience,” she states. “They are both able to do the fundamentals of the job, but they have different strengths. Jointly they offer more than one single person. They are the uber employee.”

Line managers

Another potential barrier is line managers’ resistance. Sara advises setting up a job share pilot to get over initial reticence. “It’s important to work with line managers,” she says. “We offer support and training for them.” She adds that it is important that their first experience of job shares works as a failure can put them off.

Further&More now has over 700 candidates on its books and is planning to grow this through social media. The matching technology they have is being updated and helps create a shortlist of candidates. “It is like online dating so we create the shortlist and they choose who they gel best with,” says Sara, adding that it is important that pairs share core values and their online questionnaires looks to investigate these, for instance, their attitude to risk or to punctuality.

She feels that more than overcoming resistance to job shares, what is needed is to raise awareness by spreading case studies of effective job shares. Sara has big ambitions for job shares and hopes her company can go international in the next year. “I want to see job sharing weaved into the DNA of every organisation,” she says simply. “I would like to see every full-time job should be open to a job share.”