Beyond the 9-to-5: How Job Sharing Can Transform Your Career

This week on "Work It Like a Mum," we dive deep into the world of job sharing with Chloe Fletcher and Laura Walker, co-founders of The Job Share Revolution. We explore how job sharing can transform your work-life balance, boost productivity, and still allow for career progression. Whether you're contemplating a job share or just curious about its mechanics, this conversation is packed with insights.

Key Highlights:

• The journey of Chloe and Laura from colleagues at Asda to pioneers in job sharing.
• Practical advice on how to initiate and manage a job share arrangement, including setting up shared emails and ensuring seamless communication.
• The benefits of job sharing, not just for employees but for employers too, with an emphasis on increased productivity and job satisfaction.
• Chloe and Laura address common concerns and challenges associated with job sharing and offer solutions to overcome them.
• Explore the personal stories of Chloe and Laura, revealing how job sharing enabled them to pursue other passions and responsibilities without sacrificing their career goals.

Perfect for working parents, HR professionals, or anyone interested in innovative work arrangements, this episode sheds light on a flexible work model reshaping how we think about professional roles and responsibilities. Tune in to hear how you can potentially double your workplace impact without doubling your hours.

Show Links:

The Job Share Revolution Website

Connect with Chloe Fletcher on LinkedIn

Connect with Laura Walker on LinkedIn

Connect with your host, Elizabeth Willetts on LinkedIn

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Transcript

Elizabeth Willetts: 0:01

Hey, I'm Elizabeth Willits and I'm obsessed with helping as many women as possible achieve their boldest dreams after kids and helping you to navigate this messy and magical season of life. I'm a working mom with over 17 years of recruitment experience and I'm the founder of the Investing in Women job board and community. In this show, I'm honored to be chatting with remarkable women redefining our working world across all areas of business. They'll share their secrets on how they've achieved extraordinary success after children, set boundaries and balance, the challenges they faced and how they've overcome them to define their own versions of success. Shy away from the real talk? No way. Money struggles, growth, loss, boundaries and balance. We cover it all. Think of this as coffee with your mates, mixed with an inspiring TED Talk sprinkled with the career advice you wish you'd really had at school. So grab a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, make sure you're cosy and get ready to get inspired and chase your boldest dreams, or just survive Mondays. This is the Work it Like A Mum podcast. This episode is brought to you by Investing in Women. Investing in Women is a job board and recruitment agency helping you find your dream part-time or flexible job with the UK's most family-friendly and forward-thinking employers. Their site can help you find a professional and rewarding job that works for you. They're proud to partner with the UK's most family-friendly employers across a range of professional industries, ready to find your perfect job? Search their website at investinginwomencouk to find your next part-time or flexible job opportunity. Now back to the show.

Elizabeth Willetts: 1:55

Hello, welcome to this week's Work it Like A Mum podcast episode. Today I'm delighted because I'm chatting with Chloe Fletcher and Laura Walker from the Job Share Revolution, and we're going to be talking all about job sharing, how you can make it work within your organisation and also how you can make it work for yourself. So if you've got any questions about job sharing, if you've considered it before, then this episode and this conversation is for you. Thank you so much for joining me today. It's such a pleasure to chat with you both and learn more about job sharing. Oh, thank you for having us. Oh, so tell me, how did you two meet?

Laura Walker: 2:30

Oh, that's a good question. Feels like a very long time ago. I don't actually remember when we met, but Chloe does. But we'll not go into that. We met a very long time ago. We both worked at Asda. So Chloe and I both both got backgrounds, we're both accountants for our sins and we worked in finance at Asda for a long time and probably I don't know what nine, ten years ago. We worked together in very similar roles in finance at Asda, always got on well, had really complementary work styles and worked in some kind of big and stressful jobs at Asda and always kind of found ourselves supporting each other ASDA and always kind of found ourselves supporting each other and finding ways to work together to help each other through some of the challenges of work.

Laura Walker: 3:11

And then Chloe went off on maternity leave and then came back and I think the first time we ever thought that we could job share is not long after Chloe came back from maternity leave. Chloe was working four days a week and I was working full-time. We weren't in a job share, we weren't in any kind of formal kind of relationship, we were just working in similar roles. But Chloe wasn't in the office or wasn't working on a Friday and I kind of almost like picked up a support role a little bit. You know, when Chloe wasn't in, if someone needed something, that would kind of come to me and then I would sort of make decisions as to whether Chloe it was absolutely urgent and we needed to give Chloe a ring or whether we could just deal with it in her absence.

Laura Walker: 3:50

And I think there was a time when someone tried to. Basically we worked in a finance business partner in role, so we were trying to hold people to account for performance and someone came to me and said, oh no, chloe said I didn't need to hit my P&L this month. And I was like there's no way, that's true. So I just said no, that's not what happened. Chloe wouldn't say that you need to hit your P&L and kind of managed it.

Laura Walker: 4:11

And I remember at that point thinking I could work really really closely with Chloe. We work so close, we understand each other really well, no one could kind of drive a wedge through us. So at that point we thought, I think we thought we could one day do job shares together and then basically the pair of us then proceeded to have maternity leaves that didn't cross over. We never found ourselves kind of back, working in a similar role at the same time until about probably about five years. After that we ended up both doing different roles and finally managed to bring ourselves together as a job share. So we've known each other a very long time and worked together really closely and I think that's formed the basis of our kind of working relationship, first in a job share and then together now as business partners.

Elizabeth Willetts: 4:56

Wow. So I guess it sounds like you sort of fell into job sharing, but there must have been who sparked that initial conversation. Then you know how did that conversation initially go.

Chloe Fletcher: 5:04

I think we'd probably been plotting a job share for a long time because we like certainly the part-time option generally in the business, was kind of working a four-day week, which neither of us really found an optimal solution for ourselves personally. And at the time I was a senior director doing a maternity covering for George. So I was the George Finance Director and Laura was working leading our shared services and previously Laura had worked a three-day week but she'd been also promoted and she was the director of the shared services and it was working really well for the business, but not really for either of us optimally for everything else we wanted to do outside of work. And they came to a point where my maternity cover was coming to an end and Laura had been in this role and had gone up to four days and we just had a conversation. I remember having a conversation with Laura saying I need to like work out what I'm going to do next and Laura said well, actually you know I'm not happy doing four days either. And so we just had this conversation and said, well, why don't we propose a job share to do the role that Laura was doing?

Chloe Fletcher: 6:06

We both had a conversation with our line manager at the time and I think it was very informal, we hadn't got a business case prepared, we hadn't really like pulled together much on it. But my manager I can really remember this conversation because she was just like, well, that is an absolutely brilliant idea, because I think for me it was going. That is an absolutely brilliant idea Because I think for me it was going to return me in the business. And I think it was very similar for Laura. I think Laura had a conversation where she had a really positive appraisal and a conversation with her manager along the lines of you're doing really well. And then at the end of that she said, yeah, but I'm not happy. And I think, like the guy who was managed at the time, I think he was like a bit shocked. But then she also said, well, I've got a solution and the solution is Chloe. And because he knew me and like we were well known in the business, it was just it wasn't really a big discussion. It was like, yeah, ok, great, you can do a job share.

Chloe Fletcher: 6:57

And then it was very much left to Laura and I to formulate how that job share would work, like what we would do.

Chloe Fletcher: 7:05

We proposed that it would be kind of a three and three. So Laura would work three days, I would work three days with one crossover day and then we went from there. So we didn't have a huge base of knowledge around job sharing before we went into it. The only thing we really had was a knowledge that we could work together and that we would work together well and that we had really complementary skills. So actually for the business it was a massive win, because I come from a commercial finance background, laurie's from a much more kind of corporate finance background and we quite often talk about the unicorn employee that that created, because you created one person that you would never find in a finance director role. Because we had such different background and experience that we came to offer so much more for the business and I think the business recognized that. But then they gave us a lot of kind of independence in setting it up how we wanted to make it work, which was absolutely brilliant, I think, from our point of view.

Elizabeth Willetts: 8:00

Absolutely. How do you do keep it, though? So I'm guessing the aim is you're both of equal partners in this. How do you do that? How do you make sure that one is not like the managing the other? You know? How do you keep so equal?

Laura Walker: 8:15

I think it's really important that it is set up on that basis. It's an absolute partnership of equals and I think you've got to make sure that stays sort of front and centre. I think that there's almost some kind of core mechanisms that a business needs to put in place. So one really important mechanism is you need to be evaluated together so you know if you're in a role, you have a set of shared objectives and deliverables and you work together to deliver those objectives. I think that's really important because if you give a job share, two separate sets of objectives, there's a natural tension between what you prioritise in that role. So I think having shared objectives is really really important. But then between the pair, the most important thing is that you've got trust between the pair and you see each other genuinely as partners. So we often say there's no room for ego in a job share. It's about kind of working together for the collective good. It's like the pinnacle of teamwork, I think. But if you sort of set that ego aside and really build trust between the pair that you're working together to deliver on a goal, I think that's how you make job shares successful.

Laura Walker: 9:23

And people often say you know, oh well, surely one person's got to be in charge, surely there's got to be kind of one person who the book stops with. And the answer is no. It's a genuinely a team, a team of two, a pair, where the decisions are made and the accountability sits absolutely with both of you at the same time. So that means you need to really really work on that relationship and you know, chloe and I have known each other for a long time. We get on really really well. But we also disagree really really well.

Laura Walker: 9:50

So we often, you know, have differences of opinion. We do. I mean, we've never had a shouting match. We really do have differences of opinion and we work together to decide on kind of how we work through that and work out what the best outcome is. But we sort of say it's a little bit like a sort of successful marriage, in that you don't argue in front of the kids. So together we sort of have our differences of opinion sometimes or we challenge each other's thinking, but in terms of what we present out to our stakeholders we're very, very joined up. So no one would ever know, you know, who thought what, before you go out and kind of have a conversation, whether that's with the team that you're managing, or with your line manager, or with with your kind of external stakeholders. You have to make sure you seem you are really joined up.

Elizabeth Willetts: 10:32

So it sounds like your employer was quite bought into it and they said it was a good idea. But did you have any objections from the business?

Chloe Fletcher: 11:44

I think there was probably there weren't any objections, but I think there's probably people who worried about it when we first started, so stakeholders who didn't understand it and it's fair to say it wasn't a widespread way of working within our employers, so people hadn't come across job shares, especially in senior roles before. So there may be, there were a few job shares, but they were most likely at kind of an admin level and definitely I think some of our peers probably thought, well, how is this going to work? And I think for our team as well, like initially the actual engagement of the stakeholders and the team to tell them how it was going to work and almost to reassure them that they wouldn't have to kind of repeat themselves. We had a golden rule and the golden rule was that you know a stakeholder shouldn't have to kind of work out what's going on within the job share. It should seem like we are one person, so you don't need to think about who you talked on a certain day, you don't need to repeat yourselves because we will manage all that behind the scenes. And that is so critical to any job share in making it kind of a seamless relationship so that for your stakeholders and your team. You know it works really well.

Chloe Fletcher: 12:48

So I think, although there was probably some concerns at the beginning, it was probably more just an ignorance of, well, how is this going to work? I don't get it. I just don't get how this is going to work. And then very quickly, like once, people saw actually how it did work. People were on board and I wouldn't say we encountered any real resistance. In fact I think we had some really positive comments from the team around being managed by two different people, because you actually get kind of two different opinions, two different sets of support.

Chloe Fletcher: 13:17

And actually I think also from our manager, we got a lot of feedback that it was actually easier than expected to manage a job share, because what happens between the two of you is there becomes this kind of coaching relationship that if you're stuck on something, you don't need to seek the support of your manager necessarily, because you can often work it through with each other.

Chloe Fletcher: 13:37

So the outputs kind of often get to a much better place without that intervention from your manager. And I think our manager well, he definitely felt that and he definitely was then an advocate because he then started to use it as a solution within the team. So actually after we had left that particular team, he then used that as a solution for a maternity back fill and for another role so there are two other roles within his team that then he then recruited job shares into and I don't think that would ever have happened if he hadn't seen it working well, kind of with Laura and I have happened if he hadn't seen it working well kind of with Laura and I. Sometimes it's seeing it to dispel some of the myths of all the things that people perceive as issues with job shares are often the power that then is displayed by a job share.

Elizabeth Willetts: 14:21

In the end, what about people emailing you like did they email the wrong person on the wrong day? They called it.

Laura Walker: 14:27

Well, this is one of the things we're doing at the job share revolution is we're starting to kind of educate people about basic, simple tips and techniques to be able to make your job share work. So we had a shared inbox, but it didn't matter who anyone emailed. So we just found we each had separate email addresses and both of them got auto forwarded into one email, and that's how we run our business. Now all of my emails go to Chloe and all of hers come to mine into this shared inbox, and then you just respond. So you know what that means is. I don't know.

Laura Walker: 14:57

Sue sends an email to Chloe but gets a response from me, and at first that might be a little bit feel a little bit odd that you're getting a response from the person you didn't email, but actually all Sue's really bothered about is that she's getting a response to the question that she's asked. So there's all sorts of things you can do behind the scenes as a job share to make that process really seamless. Because, as Chloe said, you know, the golden rule is to our stakeholders. They just act as if they're dealing with one person and we manage the things that go on behind the scenes.

Elizabeth Willetts: 15:27

Did you find you're constantly though at that point then reading back through the thread to get yourself up to speed, or was that crossover day like it helped, you know, reduce that? I?

Laura Walker: 15:37

think that goes into kind of another. One of the things that's really important is about how you manage handover, because really it depends very much on what the situation is. So you know, if it's kind of little thing around, can you sign off this invoice or can you do this quite tactical piece of work. Yes, you might scan back down through the email to see what's happened before. If it's something really important or a really big decision that's been made or something where it's really complicated and you need to know the ins and outs that'll have been covered up in the handover. And one of the things is really important is how you manage that handover, because you don't have to tell your job share partner absolutely every single thing that happened. So I don't know if, if we got an email telling us that there was going to be free cookies in the atrium on Tuesday, chloe doesn't need to know that. I mean, I probably would tell her that those free cookies just make her a little bit jealous that I got free cookies and she didn't.

Laura Walker: 16:29

But you have to manage the fact that she doesn't need to know absolutely everything. The same goes for like work things as well. You don't have to hand over absolutely everything. You've got to get really good at discerning how you do a handover in a really effective but also a really efficient way to maximize the time, because job sharing is absolutely not about spending the whole of a handover day or a crossover day sat together. You know, distilling information for an eight-hour day, a handover shouldn't really take more than about an hour. So you've got to make some of these techniques and tools to make that work really efficiently.

Elizabeth Willetts: 17:04

So what would you do then on a crossover day? For the rest of the hours, do you just work independently?

Chloe Fletcher: 17:09

Yeah, and I think that's a really important thing because actually a business is paying for six days and often one of the first questions about a job share is well, actually I'm paying for 1.2. So like I'm not going to do it because actually it's too costly, but actually that time is really productive. So we had really discerning rules around what we would both be involved in. So on a crossover day we wouldn't both sit in something unless it really kind of hit that high bar of what we both said we should be involved in. So, for example, if it was a board meeting for the finance leadership team, we would both be in it, because it would make it much more difficult to hand that over and there was real value in both those opinions being in the room. But for other meetings, the large majority of the time there would just be one of us in there, because actually there's no real added value to people being in that session. So on a crossover day we would definitely have like some handover time, but, as Laura says, that was probably like only really an hour, because we got really good mechanisms for like handing over all the information and so we would use voice notes to do that. We had a shared one note to be able to kind of really understand what happened in all the meetings. The rest of the time, though, was then spent separately, because the really important thing is that time is productive time, so although you're paying as an organization for 1.2 of an employee, you're actually getting that productivity of that time as well. It's not dead time to the organisation. So we would lead one-to-ones with our team separately in the first role that we did. So we didn't both sit in one-to-ones, we had like a lead manager. We would go to different meetings separately, and then we would just manage it in the normal way of us handing over anything, as in the other days when we were out.

Chloe Fletcher: 18:49

And I think that's an important myth to dispel, because I think quite often that's a barrier to people putting job shares in because they think it will be more costly, but actually our experience and also the research shows that it is up to 30% more productive, because you've got kind of three days only each in the office where you're fully on. You know you've come in. You've had two days out of the office. I used to come in on a Wednesday, and I'd just be so full of kind of like energy, because I'd had two days filling my bucket doing the other stuff that I love outside of work.

Chloe Fletcher: 19:21

And equally for Laura, like Wednesday is her kind of final day in the office, so she would be completely on it. So I think that's an advantage that people don't see as well just this productivity and and also driven by the real accountability to each other. So on a Friday I would never want to lower down and leave with a massive to-do list when she came in on the Monday. So I'd be so productive on that Friday because I'd be like, right, yeah, I've got to deliver all this thing for Laura as well, because of this real kind of accountability to deliver for the pair of you yeah, what about the person on the Wednesday?

Elizabeth Willetts: 19:53

you hand a hand over together, I guess, and you did it in person. What about the person that was handing over on the Friday? How did you hand over to Laura?

Chloe Fletcher: 20:01

so I handed over on a Friday. So it would work pretty much in the same way in that. So we had a handover note which would document kind of the key things that you know had been done, needed to be done, anything that we needed to discuss. I'd also record Laura voice notes. The voice note was used to like talk about anything that couldn't be kind of conveyed, the things that weren't said in a meeting, the nuances from different meetings around how stakeholders were feeling. That was all done through voice notes. So I'd record that on a Friday. So when Laura was driving into work on a Monday she could listen to that voice note, then she could read the handover notes and then she would be pretty much good to go.

Chloe Fletcher: 20:39

So I think we very rarely ever spoke, you know, as a formal handover, as Laura came into the office and equally, although we had time together on the Wednesday, we would do exactly the same thing. So on a Tuesday night Laura would record me a voice note. She would document kind of in the one note the handover, and often I would listen to that. I'd come in early. We were in retail, it was really really early kind of starts, but I'd come in and just be ready to go, because I'd listen to that voice note on my journey into the office. And then if I saw someone as I walked into the office, even though I hadn't seen Laura, I was ready to go because the handover was fine-tuned. I think it was definitely. We got better and better at handovers and it's something that we really concentrate on within the business now, because you get that right and that allows you to really just fly when you come into the office without then spending, you know, the first three hours on a Wednesday doing handover.

Elizabeth Willetts: 21:33

Yeah, and is there any tips for how to do a really good handover? I know you've mentioned voice notes. Is there anything else?

Laura Walker: 21:39

I think the biggest tip that we talk to people who are job sharing about is about being kind of really clear on using this sort of technology in the right way. So things like shared inbox, shared one note, all that sort of stuff, but then being really clear on when you were doing handover. Handover means lots of things really. So some things are for information, some things are for action and some things are for discussion. So really the stuff that's for information if I'm purely disseminating information, that can all be done written down by kind of flagging some emails or kind of through a voice note For things that need action that's just kind of good, almost like performance management Make sure you've got a clear to-do list. You know where you're up to on things. That's kind of reasonably tactical. This is where I'm up to, this is what needs to happen, but the important bit is being really clear on what needs discussion.

Laura Walker: 22:29

So you generally in a job share get one time every week where you can be together and discuss some of the kind of challenging or difficult things that you need to work through, kind of challenging or difficult things that you need to work through.

Laura Walker: 22:38

And this is really where the power of job sharing comes through, because you get two opinions on some of the really tricky things. So it might be a performance management issue, or it might be a client that you're really trying to make a breakthrough with, or all sorts of things that you might want to get two perspectives on. Really use your time together for those things, for the discussion things, the things that really matter, and, you know, be really discerning, like Chloe said, about how you use that time to make sure you're tackling the things that really warrant time together. So don't definitely don't sit in a room together and have one of you reading an email like that's a waste of time. You need to make sure you're being really discerning about how you use that time. So, breaking things down into for information, for action and for discussion, I think that's a really helpful way to frame your hands cover when your day's up, will you ever tend to check your emails?

Laura Walker: 23:26

the thing with this we always say is it breaks the mate right. So if you've got a shared inbox, no matter what you're doing on a job I mean we use shared files, we've shared notes we use if I go in and start messing around and sending emails when Chloe is busy, kind of sending emails at the same time, that's absolutely going to break the system because you know Chloe might be halfway through replying to someone, or Chloe might be working on a, a review of a document or whatever. If I go in and start messing about, it's going to break it. So actually I was always tempted to do work on my days off, like I had massive FOMO, like I really loved work.

Laura Walker: 24:05

I loved a lot of the things that I did outside of work, but I really, really loved my job and the number of times Chloe was doing something and I was like itching to be doing it, but it was on a Thursday or Friday. So for me, job sharing was transformative because it meant I couldn't mess around, I couldn't go in and work on my days when I shouldn't be, and that meant that I was fully able to focus on the things that I wanted to do outside of work and that's what drives the benefits around well-being and you know better, mental health and all the rest. You genuinely switch off because it forces you to, because I was terrible at that. So, yes, I was very, very tempted, but in no uncertain terms. Chloe would tell me get out of that if you're doing it on your day off, because it just fundamentally breaks the system.

Elizabeth Willetts: 24:45

Can you, is? It quite easy, you know, on your crossover day to see what's been replied to and what's not in a shared inbox.

Chloe Fletcher: 24:51

Yeah, I think we got like really good at managing the triage of our emails so we had very clear filtering system for you know, what had been read, what was to action was just for info. So those categories that kind of laura talked to, is it for info? Is it for action? Do we need to discuss it? We use, like you know, we use the functionality of the inbox to manage that, so we would only leave in the inbox things that actually needed action. In. Anything else, that was for information, we would like triage it in the right way so that it was very clear what you needed to do. So, like we received huge amounts of emails in our roles at Asda, like.

Chloe Fletcher: 25:29

But what it does mean is you have to be very organized.

Chloe Fletcher: 25:32

So you know, if you are somebody who struggles with that and I certainly was, like before we started job sharing, I used to just I mean, I remember that the first time I showed Laura my inbox before we started job sharing and I think she did definitely think we couldn't job share because I had about 3,000 unread emails, they weren't unread.

Chloe Fletcher: 25:51

I can just read them in my, you know, I could see them in my view bar but they triggered as unread and Laura's like what's that?

Chloe Fletcher: 25:58

Because she was so organized in how she worked and we have, you know, to make a job share work you have to be really, really organized, because when you, you know, finish, when I finished on a Friday, I had to triage the inbox so that Laura would come in and know which were for info, which were for action, and then all the rest just had been kind of dealt with.

Chloe Fletcher: 26:16

So it does require a level of organisation, but in my mind, if that meant I could have two days completely out of the office, still have access to a really senior, interesting role, you know I was so up for that Because before that I had worked a four day week where I just couldn't switch off on my fifth day because there was nobody covering my role in the fifth day in the office. And so the difference, you know, between doing a four-day part-time role and doing a job share was just absolutely transformational, and so it meant some sacrifice in in the way that I work, but arguably I'm just much better organized now. Laura can sleep at night talk me through holidays.

Elizabeth Willetts: 26:59

What did you do when one of you went on holiday?

Laura Walker: 27:02

I think that managing holidays depends very much on the organisation and the kind of needs of the individual organisation. But certainly the way that we managed holidays was that we tried to not be off the same week on kind of extended holidays. So you know, you might take a week off at the same time together, but if the organisation was going to be without cover for more than about a week, we tried to stagger it, and what that means is you obviously create a benefit for the organisation, particularly in some of these kind of, you know, senior roles where you might want to have people around more of the time. So generally, if the holiday was sort of two weeks or more, one of us would take it off and then the other one would take, like the next, two weeks off. So summer holidays is a great example. You know, generally during the summer holidays you have a two week period where there's no one in the office. Chloe and I have always staggered our summer holidays and what that's meant was, you know, every single week through the six week school holidays there was someone in. You have to be a little bit careful with that, because what you don't want to do is set an expectation with the organization you know for the individual, set an expectation that there's someone in and then you effectively get bombarded with five days of work in three days. So you have to be quite disciplined in how you set expectations about kind of what will get done, because you do work only a three-day week.

Laura Walker: 28:19

But I think the other thing to say is it goes beyond holidays. One of the things you get in a job show is a level of flexibility. So, for example, I remember when it was the school strikes I can't remember exactly what the meeting was going to be, but we were having some a meeting I think it was on a Tuesday and suddenly they said my kids were going to be off school. And this is like a significant high impact meeting. That was really, really important. I was in.

Laura Walker: 28:45

But you can't do a significant high, you know important meeting with two kids like running around you to the level of success. I wanted to, but Chloe was off, it wasn't a working day and her kids were in school, so she covered that meeting and I think that's a sign of the flexibility kind of it works both ways. So you know, I'm absolutely not saying that you should expect that someone who's working a job share repeatedly works in their non-worker days. But certainly, you know, in the sort of in senior roles there's a level of discretionary effort. We would be flexible on both sides. So I don't't know, say there was a big board meeting happening on my non-worker day, I'd flip one week so I could go in for that. I think that flexibility is really, really important and it allows you, certainly allows the business, to get kind of better cover and better outcomes because you've got two people who are able to flex and kind of deliver more for the organization so it sounds like you're Joshua obviously came out.

Elizabeth Willetts: 29:37

You're both established figures within your business. You've both obviously worked really hard over the years, got a lot of respect and then they were really happy to retain you and offer you a job share. A lot of people listening to this will want a job share. You know we've talked about the benefits. It sounds amazing to you, know to you and organizations, but they don't know who to job share with and maybe part-time at the moment or they are going back to work and it's that. I think that's the issue for a lot of people. It's finding a job share partner if there's not an obvious person about, and then applying to external organisations where they don't have that record.

Laura Walker: 30:12

Yeah, and I think this is, you know, the reason we've set up our business, job Share Revolution is to try and normalise job sharing, to increase the adoption of job sharing, so that that challenge doesn't feel so significant as it does now. Because I think if you are sat in that position now that you would like to do a job share, it's pretty hard to go about it. What I would say is lots of organisations are being progressive and trying to do different things. So my first tip would be if you're thinking about wanting to do a job share, I would start by doing a little bit of research about your current employer. So see if there's a job share policy, see if there's a job share network. More and more we are seeing organisations putting in place a job share network to be able to identify people who might want to work in that way. Or maybe you've got a flexible working group or something like that in your organization. Reach out into that and find out the current state of play. And then I would also say, talk to your manager, because often what we find now before there's the real structural solutions. There's.

Laura Walker: 31:14

Often we hear so many times that people have been paired up by a line manager or a leadership group identifying a couple of people within the organization. So I would encourage you to kind of talk to your kind of manager and have a conversation. But then I would also encourage you to just look more broadly in your network. So Chloe and I did work together very closely but you know we certainly were part of parents networks and different groups as to where you could connect with people who were in a similar position.

Laura Walker: 31:43

So think about people you've kind of maybe worked with before or people you've kind of come across in your work and environment and just start to have some conversations and see if there's anyone out there and then I guess, if you do find someone, if you come across someone, have a conversation, see how you get on.

Laura Walker: 32:00

But then I would encourage people who are thinking about job sharing and want to take that to their line, to the kind of leadership group or line manager at their organization. I would encourage them to think about building a business case so clearly setting out why this would be good for the business and why it will deliver kind of much stronger outcomes. So for example, in Chloe and I's example we talked about the power of us together and how that would really help drive the organization forward. So I'd encourage anyone who's thinking about it to really think about how does this help the business? And if you can take that to the organization and say this is how this is going to help the business thrive, that really helps kind of break down some of those barriers okay, what about, like, applying to external organizations?

Elizabeth Willetts: 32:44

how do you do that? Do you have an external shared cv? You know, how would you recommend applying to?

Chloe Fletcher: 32:49

external jobs. I think it's really important to showcase, like what you get from having those two skills and experiences together. So, like I think having a joint cv is really important and like almost like a joint covering letter. And that's certainly one of the things that we work with newly formed pairs is to like coach them to help them understand, like what is your brand, what is your skillset? Like, what do you bring to this role that's going to make you stand out from. You know one person applying for this role. So thinking through, kind of what are your unique skills that you bring? But how do they come together to really deliver better in the role that you're applying for? And so we like together as an example, we showcase ourselves together. So we have a joint cv and that goes through our career history, but pulling out through that the experiences that complement each other.

Chloe Fletcher: 33:39

But I I do think to do that you've got to do some work. First of all, thinking through, like what are your strengths individually, and then as a pair, what are your skills individually, and then as a pair, and then crafting that into a joint document that then is showcased to the employer, because people won't necessarily have come across job sharing and you need to be able to sell why the proposition of you two as a pair is stronger than employing one individual person, and sometimes you know another thing that can be useful is like sharing an FAQs document with an employer of you know. How does a job share? What is a job share? How does the job share work? Why does it have advantages?

Chloe Fletcher: 34:19

There may need to be a consideration of helping educate an employer so that they understand what it is. I think the other thing is probably depending on what industry you work in, like using recruitment consultants and finding recruiters who are progressive, who understand what it is, who understand why this might be really beneficial to an employer, and using a recruiter to try and you know, help you sell this proposition into an employer. I think that is easier said than done because I think, like certainly our experiences, there's definitely a real range of recruiters out there and finding the right progressive recruiter who you can like, educate and help start to have the initial conversations with is often a really good way because they can ask some of the questions that employers might ask and help you to kind of build that proposition of a joint kind of CV etc.

Elizabeth Willetts: 35:06

What about? I mean, I think it sounds great. And what are the downsides to dutying? There must be a couple. What would you say?

Laura Walker: 35:12

Well, I think, for the individual, I definitely think that FOMO thing was a big thing for me. You know the fact that. I mean, you know, on a superficial level it's FOMO, it's missing out on stuff that you might want to do. But I think the more serious point of that is you have to let go of a bit of control. You do have to accept that someone else will be making decisions on your behalf, and I think you have to build that relationship so that you are comfortable with that. I think when you do that, you know, as someone who you know I'm always I've always been a bit of a control freak, particularly as it comes to my career. I think working through that and getting comfortable with no longer being in control has actually been really, really beneficial for me. So I think but I do think you've got to, you've got to be able to deal with that and you've got to be able to embrace it. And for me, the thing that I always said is that the downside of, you know, having to exceed a bit of control is way outbalanced by the upside that I get to do big, challenging, interesting jobs and also do all the things outside of outside of what I want to do so. There's got to be. You know, it's almost like what do you want to have more? And my decision was that. You know, I was happy to let go of a bit of control in order to receive the other things.

Laura Walker: 36:25

I do think there's an important perspective for individuals as well, about you know, generally, a job share is three days a week, so, financially you will, you know, if you're going from full-time three days, you will take a hit. You will earn 60% of the salary. The thing that we're really encouraged by, though, is that job sharing allows people, and particularly women, to continue to progress in their organizations. So you might take a bit of a kind of step back in terms of salary in the short term, but if you continue to progress through the organization, you start to pay that back a bit, whereas, whereas I think sometimes you can be in a situation where you're working either full-time or maybe four days a week, or a part-time role that isn't properly scoped to a part-time role, and it's really really difficult to progress because your role hasn't been structured in a way that gives you the opportunity to do those development activities and the things you need to do to progress up through the organisation. There is a short-term financial element, but I think there's kind of potentially a long-term game, I think, for organisations the downsides.

Laura Walker: 37:28

I think the biggest challenge we get kind of asked about I think this is two things. The first one is the financial costs. So a job share typically is a three day plus three day and we would highly recommend that three days plus three days to have the space for those discussion points we talked about. But that more than pays back in output. You know, the business case is pretty watertight, even when you just consider things like the cost of attracting new talent or recruiting new talent in if you were to lose someone who'd previously worked full time. So I think those financial elements are kind of easily dispelled.

Laura Walker: 38:04

But then I think the other biggest well, it's not a downside, but I think it's a myth that there are in organizations is that it's difficult. I think people think it's really really difficult to do a job share and it's almost like, oh, I'm not sure about that, that sounds complicated. No, we're not going to look at that because that just sounds really hard. And I think what we say is that job sharing isn't difficult, it just needs a little bit of intentional thought as you go into it. You just need to think about how you're going to do it and when you do. The power of it is absolutely massive.

Elizabeth Willetts: 38:33

What about ending a job share? People end job shares. You know how's that? You know how do people divorce from a job share? Yeah, we talk about consciously uncoupling. Yes, how do people go, you know if they decide they want to go full-time in their role. You know when actually when the children are a bit older or they want to go to a different organization. About growing the role, how do you consciously uncouple? I?

Chloe Fletcher: 38:54

think that's part of like the basis for a job share is you need really great communication and trust, like as a foundation for the relationship. So I think one of the things that is really important to have a successful job share is that you're constantly talking and you're constantly evaluating. You know what do you want from the job share, what are your intentions, what are your ambitions? Like Laura and I certainly talk about that every quarter. Like we spend some time dedicated to talking about how the job share is going, what we want, etc. And I think, like for anybody who's in a job share, that should be something that they do, and so that conversation shouldn't necessarily come as a surprise of I'm thinking about returning to work full-time now my children have gone to school or, you know, I I'm having a baby.

Chloe Fletcher: 39:36

There's loads of different reasons that job shares might end and I think the research probably is most job shares aren't like forever. A lot of job shares are for like a period of time, while someone is either, you know, caring for people, maybe they've got outside interests there's, you know, maybe they've got a health condition. There's loads of different reasons why people may be job sharing. So I think that communication off on maternity and then they've, you know, recruited somebody in to backfill that job share. I think it's then a decision that's unique, that pair at that point. But having those conversations and being really honest is the key to that. But also, making a job share work in all respects.

Elizabeth Willetts: 40:34

Yeah, so how do you structure your business? So you've obviously founded your business and you're helping organizations implement successful job sharing. How do you structure your business now? Are you both full-time? Are you both doing the same days now as you did before? How does it work?

Laura Walker: 40:47

now. No, we still do it as a job share because, I mean, the reason we actually left asdo was because the sort of side business that we'd started had grown and was kind of more successful so we weren't able to. We'd started doing three days a week each in asda and then two days a week each on our kind of side hustle, and that side hustle grew into a kind of viable business. So we decided to kind of leave asda and now we each spend three days a week working on the Job Share Revolution and then we spend two days a week doing the other things that we really want to do, because that's all the way through this. That's what's been really important to us is we do things outside of our professional landscape. So we are both charity trustees.

Laura Walker: 41:32

Chloe's an exec coach. I run kind of marathons and silly cycle rides and all that sort of stuff. So we do different things. So it's really really important to us that we job share this role because of the benefits. So we kind of job share the role. I do Monday, tuesday, wednesday. Chloe does Wednesday, thursday, friday. That said, we make some exceptions. So today we are Chloe is working today, which is a Monday, partly for this podcast, but also because we're going to an awards ceremony this afternoon where Chloe's being shortlisted for an award. So we've flipped our days this week so that we can kind of facilitate that. But generally we are working Monday, tuesday, wednesday, wednesday, thursday, friday, which is the good rhythm for us and all the other things that we like to do outside of work.

Elizabeth Willetts: 42:18

How's the transition been going from employed to self-employed? Like a roller coaster.

Chloe Fletcher: 42:26

It's so different, it's unbelievable Like I think we both worked in corporate jobs for 20 years 20 plus years and it is a massive adjustment to like working for yourself and, like Laura said, it's you know it's a massive roller coaster.

Chloe Fletcher: 42:42

I think I've learned like more in the past, like couple of months, than I have in the past five years, like about myself and about like being productive and what success is and like all these different like questions about you know what do you want from life and actually now really being in the driving seat to do what you want. And I think it's been so exciting and it's been really exciting to see kind of some of the reaction to some of the conversations we're having with businesses. It is a massive adjustment and I think that's where the job share has been brilliant. I think if you're doing this on your own, it would be really scary like to go out on your own, but actually like the power of having somebody else by your side to be able to talk about it with and to coach you through kind of the the moments of doubt and the moments of excitement has been massively helpful.

Elizabeth Willetts: 43:27

But yeah, it's very different I think it's been good that you've done it as a scientist. Actually, you sort of proved the concept while you were both being paid in a Biasda, and that must have given you a level of confidence that the business would work.

Laura Walker: 43:41

And I think that that's one of the things. I mean we would say that job sharing is great because it allows you to do whatever it is you want to do on your days off. I mean, I don't want people listening to this thinking that everyone who job shares is then going to go and quit their job and go and do something completely different, but we know plenty of people who do different things on their non-working days and I do think, like for us, it's been hugely energizing to be able to kind of found a business, to kind of do all of that startup work whilst also doing our day job, which was, you know, challenging and consuming, but it also gave us a huge amount of energy to be able to do both.

Laura Walker: 44:16

So, yeah, I think it's a great. It's a great way. There's no way you could have done something like this. If we were working even four days a week, I think um wouldn't have worked yeah, what's next for the job share revolution then?

Elizabeth Willetts: 44:28

where do you see the business going?

Laura Walker: 44:29

well, I mean our ultimate business aim is to make our business redundant, because we don't want to be helping people to put job shares in. We want job sharing to just be business as usual matter of course, just the same as taking a weekend or having some holiday or whatever. It just needs to be a normal part of the rhythm of work. So ultimately we want the business not to need be needed. But there's a journey to go on. So our ambition is fully normalized job sharing to kind of get people adopting it.

Laura Walker: 44:59

And I guess it's not dissimilar to, you know, before the pandemic. It was interesting because Chloe led a massive flexible working program at ASDA before the pandemic about trying to get people to be able to work from home. And it was just this really big challenge around remote meetings and putting zooms on meetings and allowing people to dial in from home. And then you know, just like that the pandemic happened and suddenly everyone's able to do it. So I am not wishing for a pandemic scale activity to suddenly revolutionize the kind of approach to job sharing, but it does give you the belief that things can change when there's a real appetite and a will.

Laura Walker: 45:35

And I'm really sort of optimistic because I do think in the conversations we are having, there is a real will to change, to try new things. I think, as we are in, you know, a multi-generational workforce with lots of different demands. This is being demanded by mums, it's being demanded by generation zed, it's being demanded by mums, it's being demanded by Generation Z, it's being demanded by people who are maybe heading towards retirement, people with long-term health conditions. There are so many groups of individuals for whom job sharing is a fantastic opportunity. So I'm really optimistic that we will be able to kind of drive this forward and, you know, know supporting the efforts to normalize job sharing right across the uk and then worldwide well world domination.

Elizabeth Willetts: 46:23

I love it so how can people connect with you?

Chloe Fletcher: 46:26

find you where can they learn more? Yes, so people can. We've got a linkedin page and the job share evolution. So if people want to learn more about kind of what, what we're interested in, there, there's our LinkedIn page. We've also got a web page it's wwwthejobsharerevolutioncouk, and on there there's our contact details where people can email us to find out more if they're interested.

Elizabeth Willetts: 46:48

Brilliant. We'll put all the links in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining me today and best of luck, chloe, with your award later on today as well. Thank you. Thank you for listening to another episode of the Work it Like A Mum podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate, review and subscribe, and don't forget to share the link with a friend. If you're on LinkedIn, please send me a connection request at Elizabeth Willett and let me know your thoughts on this week's episode. You can also follow my recruitment site Investing in Women on LinkedIn, facebook and Instagram. Until next time, keep on chasing your biggest dreams.