Jobsharing - An Untapped Opportunity

Last month our CEO Tanya Stevens sat down with Laura Walker on the Jobshare Stories podcast. This podcast shines a light on successful jobsharing and how and why it works. You can listen to the full episode here.

Laura co-runs The Jobshare Revolution with Chloe Fletcher. Their mission is to transform gender equity through the untapped power of jobsharing through a range of programme design and awareness raising activities.

2023 stats from Timewise show that only circa 5% of senior leader jobs in the UK are part-time, which creates barriers for many people moving into these higher paid roles. 
Jobshares are one solution that can help unblock this issue, and Tanya and Laura covered various practical tips to normalise the model:

•    Educate yourself. There’s a growing pool of resources available for Boards, employers and candidates through organisations like The JobShare Revolution, Working Families and Timewise. These cover advantages, pitfalls, logistics and examples of jobshares in practice. If you are unfamiliar jobsharing in practice these resources offer a critical starting point.

•    Consider context. What is the strategic and structural context for the leadership role and can you offer a jobshare in good faith? Identify pertinent context specific questions now so they can be shared upfront with candidates as part of your hiring process.

•    Recruit inclusively. Having robustly discussed your openness to a jobshare, advertise this option prominently. Transparently detail how all candidates will be assessed on their merits in line with the job brief. But also detail how any jobshare partners that advance in a process will have space to separately discuss jobshare logistics and any context specific questions identified. Both of these conversations are important where jobshares are concerned, but conflating the two creates a messy, imbalanced candidate experience.  

•    Retain, support, sustain. Jobshares increase your chances of retaining fantastic women, parents, carers and professionals who might rule themselves out from pursuing a leadership role otherwise. Beyond the combined brainpower a jobshare offers your leadership team, there is a built-in support mechanism for the individuals involved that growing evidence shows to positively impact support, retention and triple bottom line thinking.