A single mother and a consultant break down the 3 key rules that helped them make their job-sharing a success

• Job sharing, which can boost female representation in senior jobs, has grown 35% in the UK since 2012.
• But it’s still not widely available, with just 2% of US employers offering it to all or most staff.
• Two women set out to Insider the three key pillars everyone should follow to make it work.
• Visit the Business section of Insider for more stories.

In early 2020, two ambitious women reached a crossroads in their 20-year careers. Former journalist and PR director Sherelle Folkes had had enough of balancing a demanding full-time position with being a single parent.

At the same time, Nichola Johnson-Marshall, a former communications director at LinkedIn, didn’t want to choose between a full-time job and running her own coaching consultancy.

The solution? The two became part of a fast-growing corporate trend that is giving people greater enhanced work/lifestyle freedom without necessarily meaning an end to career growth: Job-sharing. 

Britain’s Office for National Statistics data, for example, reveals there are around 153,000 people currently in a role share — a 35% overall increase since 2012.

There is research that such sharing provides companies with different skillsets and can raise the number of women in senior positions.

For Folkes, the price of being more present for five-year-old Sienna, and occasionally finding some downtime to avoid burnout, would have otherwise meant considering a part-time position, and a likely drop in seniority and pay.

Johnson-Marshall was already leading external communications at the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE) – an organization set up by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority to help younger banks operate in Britain – in a part-time, consultative capacity.

When a full-time contract became available, she was reluctant to give up her other consulting work.

So, she presented a business case to convert the new full-time contract into a job-share. Not only did she win the bosses over, she landed Folkes as her partner, bringing  a complementary, rather than identical, skillset to her own expertise.

They each work three days a week, earning 60% of the salary Johnson-Marshall was initially offered to do it full-time.

“I’ve always been fascinated by credible solutions to part-time working,” Johnson-Marshall told Insider. “I coach a lot of working parents, especially women, who try to go from full-time to part-time.

“A lesson I’ve learned is, yes, it’s about me and my lifestyle. But to get business sign off, you need to present it as being valuable: how two people in one role can offer greater productivity, how you’re more likely to have happier employees, who you’re likely to retain longer.”

Job-sharing as a form of flexible working is gaining traction globally. Sam White and Will McDonald share the role of group sustainability and public policy director at Aviva, while Dr Shelagh Muir and Jane Maciver are joint VP of research and development at Unilever. Like the OBIE pair, reasons span family commitments to side businesses and passion projects. 

Indeed, 41% of the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For offer role sharing. Insurer Zurich made headlines recently for advertising all its UK roles as flexible, part-time, or role share. After this, the number of women being hired in senior positions rose by a third.

Despite this, there is a significant gap between availability and uptake. Figures from the Society of Human Resource Management in the US show that 2% of companies allow it for “all or most” employees and only 19% allow it for some.

Roleshare.com, a platform that connects potential job-sharers, polled 26 senior HR professionals and 16 felt it was too difficult to set up. Johnson-Marshall observed that it tended to be driven by candidates, as companies were still not being proactive, despite various gender equality initiatives.

Sophie Smallwood, Roleshare.com’s cofounder, said some companies, for example, view job sharing as doubling a headcount.

She said that companies should follow three key pillars — don’t focus too much on headcount, establish the pair’s working principles for the role upfront and “manage the role, not the pair” — businesses can make the benefits of role sharing outweigh the additional logistics.

“A roleshare is 1.2 times a headcount, not two,” Smallwood told Insider. “Yes, you’re getting incremental costs on equipment, and potentially health, dental and life insurance, but you’re gaining twice the value in experience, skills, continuity, output, performance, and perspective.”

She also said managers should ask for a plan from job-share candidates. “This should include how they’ll handle communication, meetings, division and tracking of work and projects and working principles, like ‘Immediate Feedback’, ‘Being Flexible’, ‘Giving Recognition’ and ‘Handling Disagreements’.”

Folkes and Johnson-Marshall respectively take ownership of certain lines of work, with whoever is “on” that day leading on new tasks, and everything captured in a rolling handover document. Monday is their overlap day when they are both in team meetings, with other days agreed based on childcare logistics and preferences. 

They jointly came up with their working principles, which, Folkes said, include full disclosure and transparency, confidence and trust in one another, while learning to let go. On the days one of them is “on” on their own, they have full decision-making authority. 

They’ve also agreed on shared objectives for the role, so they are measured, rewarded and promoted together. Folkes added: “You shouldn’t see this as a temporary solution or use it to try and leapfrog elsewhere in the company.”

This echoes Smallwood’s final piece of advice. “Set your expectations and desired metrics for the role as you would normally. Treat the role as one person with one joint weekly one-to-one. Your performance review would be of the pair, supplemented by individual development feedback,” she added.

Folkes and Johnson-Marshall’s employer, the OBIE, believes it is benefiting from the arrangement. 

“Businesses typically think of recruitment as full-time, which can rule out a vast number of potential applicants,” said Alan Ainsworth, the organization’s head of policy, legal and external communications.

“By considering role-sharing, flexible working and part-time, we found precisely what we were looking for. We benefit from the creativity and ideas of two people rather than one.”

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