Ever wondered about the benefits and opportunities that can come about through job sharing? In this episode with Ellen Hooper, I discuss job sharing, the benefits, tips, and strategies to make it a successful partnership and arrangement between yourself, your job share partner, and your organisation. Ellen is experienced in job sharing and will share her career journey and how she started working with her business partner in a job share arrangement.

This is the first of two episodes with Ellen and the second is episode 93 on portfolio career.

Ellenn’s tips  for job sharing

1. Sharing Information

Have a minimum of 1 day you are in the office together. Helps with communication and attending key meetings (i.e. executive or board meetings) that are good for both of you to attend.

Have a 30-minute handover meeting each transition day to help with communication flow.

2. Project management philosophy to flexible work

Think of your role as a set of duties, within a project that you manage. You have time, scope, and resources.

If that role used to be 40 hours a week and now it’s 30, it’s like, what are you doing with that other 10 hours? How can you utilise the extra 10 hours budget? There is money there to support you. Can duties be reallocated?

3. Expectation management

What are the expectations of you as a team? Will people expect you to know EVERYTHING that has been said to the other person?

If that is the expectation, a lot of time goes into information sharing and handover. Ellen recommends working across the role, not trying to split things out based on task.

4. Communication tips

• Have fluidity in your role.
• Find a platform as a central point for communication (i.e. Teams, Google drive).
• Ellen split out Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and used this to outline the urgent items, things that needed to be closed out and the person responsible for that day
• Calendar management is VERY important

5. Managing a team

A challenge is that systems aren’t set up for two people doing the same role (i.e. only one person as contract owner and one person for the performance management system who can approve leave).

Ellen & her job share partner divided the direct reports formally due to system complexity but still worked with all members.

Ensure are clear that you both work across the team

6. Understanding how you both work

Do a personality profiling assessment to understand each other – personality traits and preferences. It is important to understand the results and work through together what it means. Review these with a coach.

Understand how the other person likes to make decisions. Ellen is very decisive whilst her job share partner is considered and reflective.

Have a review period on how things are going.

7. Benefits of job sharing

The mental load of the role has been expanded from one to two people – useful when an organisation is going through a transformation.

Different skill sets and perspectives for the role.

Able to work flexibly and pursue other areas in your career (i.e. work on another business)

 

About Ellen Hooper

Ellen Hooper does lots of things. She’s a mum of two, an executive coach, the Co-Founder of The Growth Collective who specialise in workshops and training for new and emerging leaders, and the Chief People Officer at a community-owned bank, a role that she job-shares.In this masterclass, Executive Coach and Leadership expert Ellen Hooper is going to teach you practical techniques for delegating to others and holding boundaries that you can use at work and at home.

Connect with Ellen

On LinkedIn or Instagram @ellen.hooper.consulting and her website growthcollective.com.au

 

Listen now on Apple Podcast or Spotify