Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Job sharing successfully

Job sharing is a fantastic flexible work arrangement for a role that cannot be done part time, or requires someone to be in the office providing face-to-face contact 5 days per week. For employers, it can mean retaining 2 valuable workers in a part time capacity.

Unfortunately, everyone always seems to have a bad job sharing story to share. Most of the time, when we have dissected why it did not work well, it comes back to how the job sharing arrangement was managed (or not managed) in the first place.

Here are some guidelines to creating successful job share roles:
- Make sure the job share partners are at a similar life stage e.g. parents with young children.
- Ensure each candidate has similar skills and experience so there are no issues with one taking on more work than the other.
- Both people should share a similar work ethic, have good communication skills and be clear on workloads and outcomes.
- Make sure there is a cross over period during the week so there is an opportunity to de-brief each other.
- Communicate, communicate, communicate with each other and your manager.

Use these guidelines in your business case proposal to negotiate a job share role.

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