Lessons learned in job-sharing was the main topic of our seventh community call on Friday 5th June.
Luciana has been working for Coca Cola for 10 years and is now working at Mövenpick. She was very kind and open to share with us her lessons learned and also to answer all our questions.
Why did Luciana choose part time and job sharing?
Upon returning from maternity leave after her 1st child, Luciana managed to keep the work and private life balance without sacrificing much. 5 yrs later, she got her 2nd child and realized that going back to work seemed to be an impossible mountain to climb, even in a 80% working model.
Qualities that made job sharing work and be accepted:
Trust: this is a crucial element in job sharing.
Line Manager as a Sponsor: your line manager has to be supportive and behind the idea.
Time management: Luciana worked 2 years in management role in job sharing, she and her partner both worked 60% with 1 day a week to share and update each other.
Pros for job-sharing:
- You get more value from the role.
- Sharing ideas helped solve the problems and gained in efficiency while presenting the solutions to management instead of presenting problems.
- More problems were solved and more solutions found than if one person only was doing the job.
Lessons Learned in job-sharing:
- Team members might be a bit hesitant. Questions they had were “who should I go to as manager?”. In general, it helps splitting the team members between both job-sharing partners and clearly communicate the decision to your team members and also get their agreement.
- After leaving the company, both Luciana and her partner were convinced of the benefits of job sharing and looked for a similar engagement in other companies (as a pair) which proved very hard to realize because companies do not think this way!
- Maybe the best management style in job sharing is to split the team members reporting as a way to minimize the administrative efforts needed to keep up with reporting lines in the systems and avoid duplication.