BENEFITS OF JOB SHARING
In fact, job sharing requires more attention, flexibility and communication than other alternative work options.
Today, job sharing is offered by 19 percent of employers, down from 26 percent in 2001, according to the Society of Human Resource Management’s 2005 Benefits Survey Report. By comparison, 56 percent of employers offer flextime, 37 percent permit telecommuting, and 33 percent allow compressed workweeks. Those percentages have remained more or less steady during the past five years.
However, job sharing could be poised for a turnaround. As retiring baby boomers threaten to deplete corporate workforces, many employers are taking a fresh look at the recruiting and retention advantages that job sharing has show it can offer.
The Pluses of Job Sharing
Job-sharing arrangements appeal particularly to students, parents of young children and employees near retirement, helping them balance their professional careers with personal obligations. For employers, the positive results can include not only retention of skilled workers, but also increased employee loyalty and productivity and the greater flexibility that can occur when two people fill one job slot.
Employees who share jobs tend to be loyal, experts say. When you offer people this kind of flexibility, people are very grateful for that and are willing to the extra mile.
Such loyalty can translate into better coverage and productivity than on full-time employee can provide. When a full-time employee is out sick or on vacation, for example, there’s usually no one to fill in. When a job-share partner is out, the other partner may be able to step in. And job sharers can schedule medical appointments and other personal business on their own time rather than work time.
Designing a Workable Arrangement
To work most effectively, job sharing requires the right match of job, job partners and manager.
Although it can work for positions from administrative assistant to executive vice president, consultants say, it works better with jobs that have specific duties and regular hours than with those involving less clearly defined tasks or substantial travel.
The best candidates for job sharing, experts add, are employees who are solid, committed performers and excellent communicators and it helps if they are highly organized and willing to share successes and failures alike with their job-share partners. In short, the partners must be compatible.
HR can ease managers’ doubts by training them to supervise job-share teams with a flexible style that does not insist on “face time” as a factor in evaluating performance. Managers must also get used to communicating by phone and e-mail as much as in person.
It requires a leap of faith that work will get done,” says Tim Kane, Pittsburgh-based national leader of the virtual workplace solutions practice for Deloitte, the global consulting firm headquartered in Wilton, Conn. “Managers who need a lot of control won’t do well.”
Managers and HR must also be willing to take additional administrative tasks. With one job shared by two people, there are two sets of employment and payroll records, two sets of benefits arrangements and two performance evaluations to do.
Evaluation practices vary among companies. Some job-share partners are evaluated together; others are evaluated separately.
While having two people in one job may make it harder for a manager to tell which partner was responsible for a job well done poorly, it may have little effect on the evaluation if the job sharers are jointly responsible for the team’s success.
If the partners are evaluated separately and it’s necessary to sort out who did what, says Sladek, each partner could sit on the other’s evaluation and give feedback.
Even if they overlap hours in the middle of the week and thus could swap information at that time, job sharers must have a system for keeping each other informed about their separate activities and must be able to act as one. Co-workers and customers shouldn’t have to ask, “Who’s in today?” because each partner should be able to act for the other. Bowman says, “It has to be like communicating with one person.”
Job sharers may share a phone line, a computer and even a team name to convey their identity as a two in-one employee. Such close communication often requires extra effort when job sharing starts, but over time it becomes second nature, job-share partners say.
