How businesses can use executive job-sharing to attract part-time women leaders

We’re not giving our leaders flexibility options and part-time workers are facing a permanent promotion cliff. 

Those were the revelations from new data from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency which showed only 7% of managers and 3% of CEOs are working part-time. With more than 80% of those part-time workers being women, it’s time we reconsider more flexible options for women leaders, including job-sharing. 

While part-time work has been around for decades, it’s rare to see an organisation doing it really well. The biggest challenge for all parties involved is finding coverage over the ‘non-work days’. There’s no one to sit in on a meeting, answer a question, or take a phone call as required. 

Effective part-time arrangements require a role to be purposefully re-scoped to genuinely ‘fit’ into the relevant number of days. That’s the step that often gets forgotten. 

While workplaces and the people in them have become more accepting that part-time work should be supported, the truth is that the infrastructure (or lack thereof) that most organisations put around it, often results in frustration for everyone involved. The challenge isn’t just for those who work part-time. Through countless conversations with the colleagues of part-timers, the report card is rarely glowing. Part-time colleagues are hard to catch, hard to communicate with and the whole thing creates friction.

Job-sharing can be the perfect solution – offering individuals flexibility while ensuring that the business has full coverage across the week.  

Recently, more organisations are testing the waters of job-sharing roles at senior leadership and executive levels. Put simply, job-sharing has the potential to solve the common challenges that arise in part-time arrangements and build diverse and inclusive workplaces. 

There are no set rules around how a job-share should work.

Here are five possibilities you may have never considered:

1. A job-share arrangement can make you the perfect candidate: Mixing together two skill sets, experiences and backgrounds can transform your job application into a super-candidate with a breadth and depth that’s unlikely to exist in a single person. 

2. You can job-share with more than one person: Split parts of your work across several individuals or have different people cover different days when you’re not in. Draw from existing members of your team or other teams. Rotate the person you job-share with (for example, every three months) to build capability across the organisation. 

3. You can job-share with someone more junior (or senior): Job-sharing doesn’t have to be a partnership of equals, you can partner with someone more senior or more junior, just be clear on who is responsible for what. 

4. Use your job-share status to develop key talent: Partnering with a more junior member of the team can be a great way for your job-share partner to develop skills and safely practice higher levels of work that can be hard to otherwise access. It can be a great way to retain a high-performer that’s looking for a promotion. 

5. You don’t have to equal five days: Job-sharing doesn’t have to equal five days. It’s common for job-share partners to do three days each, with a handover day. Job sharing with junior people might mean that they work full-time and only cover the role on the days you’re not in. I’ve even seen arrangements with a full-timer and a part-timer at the same level. As long as there’s work to be done, it’s clear who needs to do it and the budget can handle it, the sky is the limit in terms of combinations of people and hours.

Job-share or part-time?

Job-share is a solution to providing coverage across the week whilst still facilitating options for those looking to work flexibly. Part-time works well for work that isn’t responsive and isn’t time-sensitive. Where others are relying on someone for responsiveness and continuous collaboration, job-sharing is the ideal solution. 

How do I find a job-share partner?

There’s an assumption that job-sharing partnerships need to have the hallmarks of a partnership analogous to marriage.  

In reality, while some job-sharing arrangements may feel like soul mates, there’s plenty of perfectly functional ones that don’t.  

Some people find someone they want to job-share with (through friendships, colleagues, or asking their network for connections) and apply for vacant roles as a team. To do this, provide a single cover letter that highlights your complimentary experiences and how you plan to make the job-share arrangement work as well as submitting separate CVs.

Alternatively, people currently in part-time roles can look for people already within their organisation to partner with and provide coverage on their non-work days. This can include more junior people acting in a more senior role for a set number of days per week. 

Recruiting someone specifically for the job-share arrangement can be a great way to secure talent if there is an open vacancy. 

Ellen Hooper is the co-founder of the Growth Collective.