When I went back to work after my son was born, I went back full-time. My husband had taken three months off work to be the primary carer and to be honest, I was tired of being tired. My identity felt split down the middle and I wanted to feel like me again. Working full-time felt simpler and easier than cramming my busy, responsive job into fewer days part-time. But that’s not something everyone can consider as an option.
In talking to other mums about flexible work, I’ve recently come across an accurate term for that all-too-common experience of doing a full-time job in part-time hours — it’s called “fake part-time”.
While organisations are quite happy to dock your pay by 20 per cent for every non-workday, very few of them are considering how that dollar saving could be used to make the part-time work manageable. I guess you’re meant to be grateful for the gift of “flexibility”. You’ll fit your extra workload outside of daylight hours and as a trade-off you’re not required to attend the team meeting on Wednesday.
It’s incredibly rare to find that an organisation has properly looked at what was previously a full-time workload and really thought through what it means to appropriately design a part-time role. It’s not that it’s impossible (or even hard) to design a role for reduced hours, it just doesn’t seem to be a common practice or skill in Australian workplaces.
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.
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.
All this is against the background that part-time work has become increasingly common, with 26 per cent of women and 13 per cent of men working part-time according to the Australian Institute of Family Studies.
The secret is, all jobs are a collection of duties that at some point or another, someone made up. I know this, because after a decade working in HR teams, I was often involved in making up the job.
The main problem with working part-time is not having coverage. Having a human being to answer the questions, read the emails and attend the meetings on those non-workdays makes all the difference. Which is why, my prediction is that the future of part-time work lies in job-sharing.
Many part-time workers (and their bosses) are sceptical about job-sharing. In the job-sharing round table I host, lots of people reach out wanting to know how to find a job-share partner. There’s an assumption that job-sharing partnerships need to have the hallmarks of a partnerships 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 organisations partner people who both want to work part-time. Others have arrangements where more junior people step up into the more senior role for the relevant number of days a week. As I’ve watched this space evolve, job-share is becoming increasingly common at all levels.
And while some may be hesitant, it can be done at an executive level. I know because, until recently, I job-shared an executive role at a community-owned bank. Was it perfect? Of course not. Are individual executives perfect? I haven’t met one yet.