On November 25th, 2022, we held our onsite event in a joint collaboration with WeCoCo community and their founder Patrycja Pielaszek.
Our topic was how to empower a flexible and productive workforce, focusing on job sharing as the key to achieving this goal.
1. Job Sharing enables companies to become more productive, flexible, diverse and innovative
It is proven that sharing knowledge, tasks, and responsibilities broadens the range of activities and lead to new ideas. Diversity drives innovation as Harvard Business Review wrote already in 2013.
Job sharing also brings numerous other benefits, such as up-skilling and re-skilling, as it provides built-in knowledge and skills sharing and coaching. Because the partners in a job share partnership hold each other accountable for performance through regular communication and handovers, there is also a much higher quality of deliverables and outcomes.
2. Employees need to be proactive.
It has to start with you! You need to proactively ask for more flexibility, and come up with real arguments in convincing your boss, your team and your stakeholders. We are happy to provide coaching and support to help you achieve this quickly.
3. Be the innovator and ignite the spark.
Start with mobilising people who want to support your cause and get involved. These people are engaged, they have a growth mindset and can volunteer as part of their work time. With them as allies, you can do some test projects on the side. Hence, you don’t have to have a real “assigned” project right away and pitch it to your boss or stakeholders “too soon.” It’s usually easier to start it in the background and get stakeholder approval after the initial results and successful use cases have been presented.
Don’t expect big milestones right at the beginning. When negotiating, start with the small things, be creative and innovative, and do things differently. Also, keep in mind the basic principles of change management, which are that no one wants to be changed quickly or completely. Therefore, have a vision, but don’t worry about the big milestones.
4. It’s not only about HR (Human Resources), and even the C-level executives.
Middle management and leadership needs to be educated and convinced as well. They need to regularly live the feedback culture and listen to their employees.
When talking about innovation, we all need to be open and have the growth mindset.
It was a wonderful event that we plan to repeat very soon. Until then, get ready for the Future of Work with us and follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram.
Do you need support with designing and implementing your Flexible Work strategy? We at Sharing Tribe are happy to help.
Book a 30-minute consultation with the Sharing Tribe team and write to us at contact@sharingtribe.tech