How do you job share?

In the New York Times Jennifer Turano, Ad Sales Director at Glamour magazine wrote an in-depth description of how she shares her job with Joan O’Rourke. Jennifer has been through several partners in her eight years of job sharing, and at times she has shouldered the whole load herself ‘til she found the right person to share with. She notes,

“Finding the right person to share a job with is a little like dating — you can sense right away whether there’s a connection. I could tell that some women thought job-sharing would be easy. They were more concerned about hearing what they didn’t have to do than what the responsibilities were.

One woman wondered whether I had to entertain clients at night and do anything work-related on my days off. She wanted to know exactly when I could take vacations. There was a woman I thought I might be able to work with, but I wasn’t sure that she’d fit in at the magazine. I also wanted a partner with a sense of humor.

Then the ad director at Glamour introduced me to Joan O’Rourke, my current partner. The two of us clicked right away — we had the same style and work ethic. Both of us work three days a week. Joan works Monday and Tuesday, we both work Wednesday, and I work on Thursday and Friday. We’ve also become friends outside of work.

We share about 20 accounts, most of which are large companies, and we both know everything about each client. We never wanted our arrangement to be difficult for anyone, so we do whatever we can to make it easy. For example, we use the same phone number so we don’t need a voice-mail message directing callers to a different number if one of us is out. We also share an e-mail address.”

Turano’s example provides some excellent advice to those who want to consider a job share as part of a more flexible work schedule. Here is some other advice from the FWI team

• When thinking about how to structure your work, consider how the flexible work arrangement you want will affect your job responsibilities, your company, customers, supervisors, and coworkers.
• Talk with employees who have used flexible arrangements. Find out what’s worked and what hasn’t and how and when they involved their coworkers and supervisor. What advice would they give you? Use this information in shaping your own plan.
• Create several options for handling your job responsibilities that will work well for you AND for your company, customers, supervisors, and coworkers. Plan for everyday and emergency situations.
• Most important to any arrangement is a communications plan, i.e., the need to determine when, where and how you will be available to your supervisor, co-workers and clients. If you work part-time, job share, or are on a compressed workweek, you also need to decide on your accessibility on those days when you are not in the office
• Find a flexibility “champion” or “champions” in your organization who will support you. At best, these are opinion-leaders who can either advise you behind the scenes in achieving your goal or who can take a more public stance in favor of your proposal.

In the Times piece, Turano notes she works even harder to make her work “flawless,” to prove to her employer she is worth it. She knows that she and her job share partner get full benefits and “are an expensive team, so we want to be high-performing.” While in an ideal world, this would not be the case, workers on flex schedules need to plan carefully and keep reevaluating their arrangement. Still, it can work. Last year, Glamour’s Jen and Joan won salesperson/people of the year award.