Nicky Lowe [00:00:06]:
Hi, it’s Nikki Lowe and welcome to the Wisdom for Working Mums podcast show. I’m your host and for nearly two decades now I’ve been an executive coach and leadership development consultant. And on this show I share evidence based insights from my coaching, leadership and psychological expertise and inspiring interviews that help women like you to combine your work, life and motherhood in a more successful and sustainable way. Me and my special guests as we delve into leadership and lifestyle topics for women, empowering you to thrive one conversation at a time. I’m so happy that you’re here and let’s get on with today’s episode. Are you a working mum wondering how to keep climbing the career ladder without sacrificing your family time? Have you ever thought about reducing your hours, but feared it might stall your professional growth? Well, what if there was a way to engage fully in your career while also enjoying a rich personal life? Sound too good to be true? Well, today’s guests, Chloe Fletcher and Laura Walker are here to help us understand how you can. They’re former finance directors, but now founders and joint CEO of the Jobshare Revolution and they are helping to transform the world of work. The power of Job sharing the job share revolution have a compelling solution that could change the way you think about work and life.

Nicky Lowe [00:01:34]:
And join us in this episode as we uncover the transformative potential of job sharing, a strategy that allows you to thrive both in the boardroom and at home, ensuring you don’t have to compromise your career aspirations for family commitments. So whether you’re a CEO looking to enhance workplace equality or a working mum seeking a better balance, this episode promises insightful strategies and inspiring stories to empower you towards a more fulfilling career and life. So join us as we delve into how job sharing can not only change the way you work, but revolutionize our entire approach to work life harmony. To have you on the podcast to be talking about our subject today.

Nicky Lowe [00:02:20]:
Brilliant. Thank you for having us.

Chloe Fletcher [00:02:22]:
Thanks for having us.

Nicky Lowe [00:02:23]:
And I know that we’ve got so much that we’re going to dive into and there’s going to be so many insights and strategies, I think, for people listening on this topic. But if we take a step back, I’d love for you to kind of share who you are for people that don’t know and how you’ve come to be. The job share revolution. Could you take us a bit on that journey?

Nicky Lowe [00:02:43]:
Yeah, definitely. Thanks, Nicky. So I’m Laura Walker and Chloe Fletcher is my job share partner and she’s here today. And now, I guess Jobshare partner and co founder. So Chloe and I spent most of our professional careers working in big corporate. So Chloe worked at Cadbury and then at Asda, and I worked at Deloitte and then at Asda, and we worked in finance. We spent our lives kind of being finance professionals, doing various different jobs in finance. And we both had children at a similar time.

Nicky Lowe [00:03:17]:
Not exactly the same time, but we kind of. We’ve both got two kids. And I think what we found after having our children was that we wanted to work part time. We were still really ambitious, we still wanted to do really well in work, and we also wanted to work part time. There were things we wanted to do outside of work. So, for example, I really enjoy running and cycling and doing kind of various sporting activities. I’m a charity trustee. I kind of enjoy doing that outside of work.

Nicky Lowe [00:03:47]:
And Chloe’s got various other interests. She’s involved in a charity choir, she is kind of training, or she has trained as an exec coach. So lots of other things going on in our lives, as well as having two small children. And what we found was that working part time in kind of a normal part time role, we’d. I mean, I’ve worked every flavor of part time, so I’ve done three days, three and a half days, four days, and. But what we found was that working part time was pretty suboptimal for ourselves. Not for the business, but for ourselves. So we both found ourselves doing finance director roles at Asda.

Nicky Lowe [00:04:26]:
So Chloe was leading the clothing business, she was the finance director of the George clothing business at Asda, and I was running a shared services team. So quite a big team. About 160 colleagues in that team working in retail, which is high pace, high energy, lots going on, lots of change. And doing that four days a week just really wasn’t working for me. It was working for the business. I was delivering all my KPI’s, I was getting everything done, but it was seeping so far into my non working day and I never felt able to switch off. And the kind of compound impact of that was really detrimental to my life, really. I found myself always on, even though I had a day off and I wasn’t being paid for it, I just couldn’t switch off.

Nicky Lowe [00:05:14]:
So, you know, you’d be in the soft play, checking your emails, like literally in the ball pool, trying to send an email because something’s gone wrong, or, you know, asking a different, another mum to just watch your kid in the park so you can just nip around the corner and make a phone call and I just found it overwhelming. And it was really hard because I loved work. I absolutely adored work. I enjoyed the energy I got from it. It was brilliant, but it just wasn’t working. And then Chloe and I hit upon the idea of a job show. So we suggested to our line manager at the time, could we do a job share and both do my role, because Chloe’s role was a maternity cover and it was coming to an end and he jumped at the idea and sort of, the rest is history. We started doing a job share and pretty much immediately our lives changed in terms of our ability to get that sort of blend between work and home.

Nicky Lowe [00:06:03]:
And it was really transformational. And then as we job shared and saw more job shares and had more conversations, we just realized how powerful this work and model was. We kept being asked to talk to other people, to coach individuals, or talk to organizations about how to implement job sharing. And off the back of all of that, we just realized that this was a real opportunity to drive a difference. And that’s how the job share revolution was born. So we decided that we would actually set up an organisation to support other organizations to implement job share, because we feel really passionate that it’s about changing the system, not the people. So you need to change the working world to enable people to thrive, rather than change people to fit with the current way the world works. So we started the job share revolution and, you know, that really grew sort of arms and legs and it’s, you know, we’ve been amazed by the appetite and enthusiasm for job sharing.

Nicky Lowe [00:06:57]:
And the business has grown so much that at the back end of last year, we made the decision to actually leave our role at Asda and do the job share revolution full time, but not full time, really full time job, but split between us because we do it as a thank you for taking.

Nicky Lowe [00:07:10]:
Jobs from that journey. When you approached your line manager, had job sharing been done in Asda before? Were there any other people that had been doing it, or was this a brand new thing for Asda?

Chloe Fletcher [00:07:23]:
I think it was maybe done in a few cases, but in a junior level. So we were the first job share at a director level, and it was certainly something that wasn’t commonplace at all. So it wasn’t widespread within Asda. And I think as a result, we were definitely left to our own devices to try and work out how to make it work. That’s often the case with job share. Pairs of people can be receptive to it, but then it’s just, there’s no real defined way of how to do it. And that’s often where it becomes quite challenging because you’re left to navigate kind of the practicality of it yourself. And that’s one of the things that we find people really want to know, kind of when we’re talking to them now with the business is, well, how do I successfully set up a job share? And I think that had some real benefits for us at Asda because we were able to navigate it.

Chloe Fletcher [00:08:12]:
And our boss was very open minded about how to kind of implement a job share successfully. But I would say that once we had job shared, you could then start to see the ripple effect. So we had kind of two job shares in our team that we were managing kind of at a senior manager level. And I think what was the most kind of refreshing thing was when one of those job shares, one of them went on maternity leave and there was some other vacancies in the team. And our boss, who had never had even heard of job sharing before, he then proposed, well, I think actually, the backfill solution for this role is a job share. And wouldn’t it be great if these two individuals could job share and like to see him thinking in that way was so encouraging. And I think that’s part of it. Once you start to see it, you believe it and you can see the real transformational effect of it.

Chloe Fletcher [00:09:06]:
But often, if you haven’t seen it, you worry about the negative consequences of it and you don’t do anything about it. So I think getting high profile job sharers out into the world of work to really showcase the benefits of it is something that we’re really passionate about.

Nicky Lowe [00:09:23]:
I remember when we first connected, and I think I may have said to you then was, if only this had been an option for me when I was in corporate and I wasn’t a mum at that time. And actually, I left corporate life because I couldn’t see how I would ever manage that. And just thinking how my career kind of journey may have been different if this was part of the world of work back then, because I think, particularly for high achieving women, that when they’re career focused, you know, you give 150% and you won’t actually settle for giving less than 150%. And you may have been able to cope with that before having your children, but then you add in motherhood, and if you want to give 150% to motherhood and 150% to your career, that equation just doesn’t work. And what I love is you found a way of going, do you know what? I’m still ambitious. I still want to give so much to my career, but I also want to give so much to my life outside of work. And this is the way that I can do that. And so I think so many people listening will resonate with being that type of high achieving woman.

Nicky Lowe [00:10:30]:
So, yeah, to get into this is going to be really powerful. So can we just take a step back? Because we’ve talked about job sharing and you also, Laura, talked about, actually, you’ve tried all different types of partnerships working. Can you just help us get really clear on how is job sharing different to part time working? Or is it part of part time working? Let’s just get into the definition of what is actually a job share.

Chloe Fletcher [00:11:01]:
Yeah. So just to be really clear, a job share is doing a full time role, but two or more employees sharing that role. So both employees work part time and they split the hours, but share the tasks of the role. And the important thing is you are measured and assessed as one employee. So that’s the difference almost, that you have two people doing one full time role and you can truly work part time hours. Because the key to a job share is it doesn’t work if you try and work more than your kind of allotted time. We often, like said that that’s one of the big adjustments when you first start. Actually, normally a common pattern that you see is three days plus three days with one day overlapping.

Chloe Fletcher [00:11:47]:
And if you then work on your two days, two non working days, it actually breaks the system. So it is a true way of working your kind of part time hours in, as you say, kind of a really senior, ambitious role. So it’s a true way to access kind of jobs that are more senior, that really give you a chance to kind of thrive and push your career.

Nicky Lowe [00:12:11]:
But it’s just made me think of Chloe is often when I’m coaching high achieving women, one of the things that we talk about is where do you over give or overhelp or overachieve and that over functioning how it can weaken the system. And you don’t necessarily see it when you’re working independently, but I love that when you, as you say, when you come together, that’s really evident. And I always talk about it as like, you’re a link in the chain and if you step outside of your link too much, you weaken your link and therefore you weaken the whole chain. And that just seems such a powerful kind of. You’ve lived experience of that, of, no, I’m in my three days, I might want to give it my all, but outside of that I’m going to weaken the system if I do it.

Nicky Lowe [00:12:57]:
I think as well, when you think about that relationship and how they work together, I think there’s probably no one knows you as well as your job share partner. So there’s definitely been times where one or both of us have said, no, come on, stop putting yourself under so much pressure. Like, I mean, it’s a really small thing, but, you know, you’ve had a busy day, there’s been lots going on and you should have written kind of a handover note. And obviously it’s fantastic practice to write a handover note and do it really, really well. But if you’ve had a really intense day and it’s not feasible to fit that in, you haven’t got the headspace to fit that in. Sometimes I think early on in our job sharing journey, we would have been like, no, got to do that, got to do that. But now we’ve kind of learned that kind of honesty and openness to say, look, I’ve had a tough day, I am going to distill this information to you, but it’s not going to be in the normal way and it might be a bit more kind of light touch and we’re just going to, you know, this is just what we need to do to get through the pressure of the day that I’ve just had. And you can work together on that.

Nicky Lowe [00:13:56]:
So I think you’ve got to be. It’s really important to keep investing in that relationship so that you are always able to be honest and work together because you both know that actually well, if you fall over, because you’ve put yourself under so much pressure to do the most amazing job of a handover, that’s not going to be good for you. You’ve got to learn to kind of work through it together. And so I think the importance of that relationship is critical. But I think when you get that right, it really can help. Particularly those high achieving people who really want to do everything to 120%, it can help them kind of moderate some of that and balance some of it out.

Nicky Lowe [00:14:30]:
I’m imagining that you may come across people that go, oh, that sounds great. You were able to make it work, but that wouldn’t work in my industry, my sector, my organisation, my team. Can we just talk about some of the practicalities if people are kind of from that mindset and it’s kind of natural if people do, because this is still a new kind of way of working for many people. Are there any sectors roles that you kind of go actually, this wouldn’t work. And we’re going to put our hands up and go, that wouldn’t work there. What have you found in your kind of work in this area?

Nicky Lowe [00:15:07]:
So our very strong belief is that all roles can be shared. Absolutely all roles. And no one has yet been able to bring me a role that you couldn’t share. So, I mean, I’m well up for a challenge. So if anyone wants to bring a role and that can’t be shared, but that conversation is a really common one we have. People love the idea and then they say, but yeah, but it wouldn’t work in X, Y and Z. And I think what we spend a lot of time doing at the job share revolution is working with organizations to assess the roles and understand the enablers to make that role work. Because depending on the type of role, you might want to set the job share up differently.

Nicky Lowe [00:15:47]:
There’s all sorts of weird and wonderful mechanics of how you do a job share, but there are lots of different ways you can set it up to make it work for any role. The thing we think, though, is all roles can be shared, but not all individuals can job share. There are some personal characteristics that you either need to have or you want to learn. So we’re not saying these can’t be learned. They can be learned, but you’ve got to have the desire to want to learn them. So we think that for individuals, you have to be a collaborator. You have to at least want to collaborate in a job share. There is absolutely no room for ego.

Nicky Lowe [00:16:24]:
So you are working together on shared outcomes and shared delivery, and you have to be in it together. So if you don’t feel comfortable collaborating and someone else sometimes taking the credit for your work, that is a core part of job sharing. So it probably won’t work for you. You have to be really good at communication. Communication is vital. So if you find communication difficult and you’re not prepared to work on it, you will find job sharing hard because there has to be a seamlessness between the pair. So communication is really important, organization is critical. And Chloe won’t mind me saying this was one of the things that she found difficult.

Nicky Lowe [00:17:02]:
So I am the classic kind of six emails in the inbox, in control of your to do list and everything like that. And not long before we started job sharing, I happened to look over Chloe’s shoulder and she had something like 600 emails. Some read, some unread, all in every box, totally out of control. And I, I genuinely felt sick. I was like, how can we possibly stay on top of things, if you have 600 emails out of control and she didn’t, she had a system, it just wasn’t one that I could understand or she could articulate. But what that meant was when Chloe, when we did start job sharing, Chloe had to make a really concerted effort to kind of manage the admin, for one of a better phrase, in a more kind of considered way. And there was loads of other things I had to do that were, you know, changes to my style and my natural behaviour. But I think it’s really important that you have to be prepared to be organized because if I can’t tell which emails have been read and which haven’t been read, it’s really hard to kind of do your job.

Nicky Lowe [00:18:04]:
So I think organization is really important.

Nicky Lowe [00:18:07]:
So do you have a shared email or do people kind of, on these working days email, for example, you Lauren. And these working days it’s Chloe. Or do you have a shared inbox?

Nicky Lowe [00:18:18]:
So we have a shared inbox and we recommend a shared inbox. And there’s different ways you can do it. And what we recommend is you get both individual emails and forward them automatically forward them into one shared inbox. So that means anytime anyone sends an email to Chloe, I get it. Anytime someone sends it to me, she gets it. And then also we have a generic email. So Chloe and Laura at, so to the customer or the stakeholder, they can use any email address and it’ll find a way to us. Now there’s different ways people do it.

Nicky Lowe [00:18:54]:
And some people only have a shared email, so you would only be able to email Laura and Chloe. And that works, you know, that works fine as well. But the most important thing is that both of us have sight of everything. And that means you can never have a scenario where someone says, well, I tried to get in touch and I, I didn’t, you know, you didn’t get the email, someone else was out. And it also avoids that thing of having to kind of maintain eyes on your email on your non working days because the kind of the time and the headspace only comes from knowing you don’t have to do anything. So we think a shared inbox is really, really critical. But one of the kind of last things that you really need to be able to do if you’re to be a job share success. To be in a job share successfully is to be adaptable.

Nicky Lowe [00:19:39]:
And I think that’s one of the things we find with all sorts of pairs we talk to that that adaptability is a key thread that runs through all successful job sharers because you have to change to the scenario. So you might find that individual emails work well in your organization in that context, and everyone just copies you both. That’s great. Something might change and you might need to adapt. You just have to be able to adapt and keep changing for the situation that you find yourselves in and the kind of almost cultural norms and change in attitudes within your individual organization. So I think adaptability is important, but I actually think all of those skills that I’ve just described around collaboration, communication, adaptability, they’re skills of a future workforce, they’re skills of future leaders and the things that are going to be even more important in a kind of AI driven world. So I think learning those skills is, you know, is great for everyone. And I think job sharing is something that will become more and more common as part of a blend of all sorts of different ways of working that.

Nicky Lowe [00:20:41]:
Thank you. And I think great summary of all, of, all of the skills. And if we talk about the global kind of question of job share, before we get down into the specifics of how to make it work, I know that you’re passionate about saying that actually job sharing is a solution to gender equity and diversity issues in organisation. And for people that may not be familiar with why, can you share? Why you believe that job sharing is part of, or if not the solution to it?

Chloe Fletcher [00:21:11]:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is something we are so passionate about and one of the main drivers of the business. So, you know, for people who don’t know, there is kind of, and people probably will know, but there is a big problem with gender equity in our workplace. So there’s a gender pay gap currently of about 15% that’s going to take more than 50 years to close at kind of the current rates of progress. And really when you start to look at statistics, it really accelerates as women become mothers. And for those of you who haven’t heard of that, it’s called the motherhood penalty. So if you look at some of the stats around that women who have two children, they take home 26% less income than women who don’t have children. And if you start to look at the stats for women of colour, it’s kind of even worse.

Chloe Fletcher [00:21:58]:
And kind of when you look at the simple facts that women are often the ones shouldering the burden of care. So you know, whether, whether that is for children, whether that’s for the older generation. So the sandwich kind of generation, and often what you see is women want to stay in the workplace, are really ambitious, don’t want to make the choice about opting out, but the workplace just isn’t set up for them to do that. You’re forced often to make a choice between working or stepping out of the workplace. And there’s a real desire from people to have genuine flexibility and the real ability to be able to balance the pressures of a senior challenging role with the pressures that are at home, of having to care for your children or caring for your elderly relatives, or just of wanting to do other things that fill your bucket, that actually you need to do to be able to really thrive. And that is where job sharing comes in. And Laura talked to it earlier of there’s often lots of investment in fixing women, so making women more confident or allowing them to step up in the boardroom. But actually what we really believe is you’ve got to fix the system and not fix the women.

Chloe Fletcher [00:23:12]:
And job sharing is a way to fix the system and not the women. Because what it does is it offers you kind of a real chance to work on a part time basis whilst accelerating your career in a senior role. That’s really fulfilling, but without having to sacrifice everything else that is really important to you and that you want to do and that you need to do to be a better, all round kind of individual. So it’s not all about childcare, you know, like, actually, I started job sharing when my children went to school because actually there’s lots of other things that I’m really passionate about. So it is a solution for childcare, but it’s also a solution for so many other things. And what it starts to do is it offers you a choice. So I know, like, when I was working four days a week and kind of really similar to Laura, I found it really, really difficult to do that and balance kind of being a good mum. You know, I used to lie in bed putting my kids to bed, thinking about, and I’m really ashamed to say this, but really thinking about, you know, when could I check those emails and when could I sort out all the stuff that’s in my inbox? I found it really, really challenging for my well being.

Chloe Fletcher [00:24:19]:
And I did seriously consider stepping out of the workplace and doing something that just didn’t have the stresses involved. But when I started to job share, I actually saw there was another solution that would allow me to be really ambitious, really to continue to do what I love to do in a sustainable way that would let me thrive. And I think that’s the difference. Job sharing is a change to the system that allows women to thrive in senior roles whilst also thriving in the home life. And whilst you do that, you then access a whole new wealth of talent within your organization. So, you know, if you’re a leader listening to this and you’re thinking about, well, why should I do job sharing? If you’re able to retain that brilliant talent pool, you’re creating real diversity of thought in your leadership team. You’re creating kind of a leadership team that has women on it who are consumers, you know, who are the people who are often the customer in your business, and that leads to much better outcomes for your business as well. So this is not just good for individuals, this is also really good for organizations and it solves so many problems of talent retention and gender equity and real diversity on your leadership teams.

Chloe Fletcher [00:25:39]:
And it’s. I just think it’s a real untapped.

Nicky Lowe [00:25:42]:
Solution for organizations, the kind of gender, the gender gap. But listening to you say, I’m like, God, this is just good for humans. It’s about making workplaces more human. And whoever you are, whatever your circumstances are outside of work, it just allows you to be a whole human and do work that you love and give your ambition to your career whilst also showing up in your personal life how you want to, for those that matter most, whether you have children, caring responsibilities or not. And I think, I really hope that we see this kind of cascade across organisations for everybody because, yeah, just having more human workplaces feels so important.

Chloe Fletcher [00:26:30]:
I think you’re right because I think it allows you. Sorry, I think it allows you to also show up as yourself. You know, if you talk about diversity and like, being able to belong, I feel that when I was able to job share and really then settle into who I was as an individual, I showed up at work in a real genuine way without having to hide and conform to a norm that I previously may have thought had been there and I could really start to just be myself, stand up for what I believed in. And then I think that is an absolutely brilliant example to other women in the organisation as well, who see that you don’t need to change yourself to be a success. And I think that is so, so.

Nicky Lowe [00:27:14]:
Important because it’s almost like we all feel anyway in organisations that we might have to fit this ideal worker paradigm, whether, you know, we’re male, female or not. But, you know, we don’t have any commitments outside of work that would distract us from giving everything to our work and obviously that’s just not real. So, yeah, it enables you, as you say, to show up and role model that. So we’ve talked about all of the amazing benefits and people might be sitting there going, God, you know, if this is so brilliant, why isn’t everybody doing it? But I’m imagining you’ve had to navigate some of the challenges that come alongside this type of working arrangement. Can you share some of the common challenges that either you’ve experienced or you see in this space?

Nicky Lowe [00:27:57]:
Yeah, I think. I think that the common challenges, I think the biggest challenge people face when looking for a job share is kind of actually finding a job share partner and then getting that adopted within their organization. So having to build a business case and go to their employer and ask if they can do it. And I think that’s part of the reason we set up the job share revolution, to remove some of those barriers. But I think the biggest challenge is when you actually get over that and you start to do a job share. I think that the biggest challenge often is educating other people. So the number of times we had to say, no, no, you don’t need to email us both or no, no, you don’t need to tell us both because it’s really important for the stakeholder to not have to repeat themselves or they have to treat you as if one person. But one of the common things we hear a lot is, all right, well, I’ll have to do the team meeting on your joint day, and you’ll have to do all of your one on ones on the joint day, and you’ll have to do XYZ on the joint day.

Nicky Lowe [00:29:05]:
And actually, people seem to find it difficult to understand that you won’t spend much time together. So successful job sharing actually involves not duplicating. So we kind of often have to work to educate stakeholders on how job sharing works and how you kind of enable a job share to thrive. So one of the things we do at the job share revolution is we train line managers and hr teams to help them understand how to change your internal processes. And it’s tweaks to internal processes. It’s not massive changes. But one thing that’s really important, for example, is to have shared objectives. So to have shared objectives and probably shared want ones and performance reviews because you are delivering together as a pair.

Nicky Lowe [00:29:55]:
So I think it’s really important that those around a job share understand how it works. And that’s part of the mission we’re on because what we find so often is that people are kind of enabled to do a job share, but then there’s absolutely zero support to make it work and they have to just find a way and muddle through. And, you know, a lot of the people who job share are absolutely fantastic, capable individuals, and they’ve all worked out how to make it work in their own way with a bit of trial and error. But actually all that energy invested into working that out, that could have been invested into doing the job, and you could have got all of that additional output through the role. So all these people are delivering the role, and then they’re kind of also dealing the burden of trying to work out how to make it work. So again, back to fixing the system. We want to shift the system system so that if you start in a job share, you have the frameworks around you, you have the practices, you not having to educate your line manager and your HR team on how it works because they already know. And I think that’s one of the important things, is how you get everyone to understand how it works.

Nicky Lowe [00:30:59]:
And it’s not difficult. It just needs a little bit of thinking. So I think that’s one of the things that’s really, really important, is to try and raise awareness generally so that some of that burden falls away from the job share.

Nicky Lowe [00:31:11]:
Brilliant. Because I can absolutely imagine that you could be individually or collectively in your pair making it a really success. But if the system doesn’t support that and then enabling it, you’re going to spend so much time and energy trying to make the system work. What are some of the other challenges? So that’s the kind of organization piece. What else have you found as some of the challenges?

Nicky Lowe [00:31:39]:
I think for the pair, you absolutely have to think about the relationship and how you build the relationship between you. And I think this is something we see less often as a challenge once the job share starts, but almost like a pitfall to try and avoid. Because if you haven’t got a strong working relationship, the job share will not succeed. You need to make sure that the pair work really effectively together. So making sure you invest the time to get to know each other, to kind of agree on kind of core values and ways of work and kind of do some of that setup, I think that is really important. And I think finding that time is a challenge. I think, you know, in kind of high pressured roles when you’ve probably got one day of overlap that is really challenging to make sure you invest the time in the relationship and in each other. And we would recommend kind of at least once, well, no, probably once a quarter, spending a good chunk of time together, almost doing a bit of a job share strategy day, just working on, you know, how.

Nicky Lowe [00:32:44]:
How are things going, what’s gone well? What could be even better if you did it differently, what you need to do more of, what you need to do less of, and having that point to connect and calibrate and just, you know, check in on how the, how the role is working and how it’s working for you individually, that’s really, really important because quite frankly, the wheels come off when the job share relationship doesn’t work. And that’s the most, almost common failure point. If you don’t get an effective working relationship between the two, that’s the biggest, almost like game changing challenge that you might face as a job share. If you’ve not got that relationship and not everyone can share with everyone else, you know, different people will work differently with kind of others. It is absolutely not the case that you should just get two random people who happen to be, for example, coming back from maternity leave and just go, oh, they both want to work part time, let’s put them together. That is not guaranteed to work. You have to make sure that they’ve got the right sort of alignment of values, the right alignment of goals. They like each other, they want to work together, and then the magic can happen.

Nicky Lowe [00:33:52]:
But if you haven’t got that core basis of a kind of almost like a cultural fit between the two, it won’t work. So, you know, that’s my biggest kind of watch point for anyone listening who might kind of be a leader or a line manager thinking about pairing job shares together. Don’t just take two random people and smash them together. It has to be people who kind of get along and are able to form a really strong working relationship.

Nicky Lowe [00:34:17]:
What it made me think is I do a lot of work in organizations around high performing teams and all of the elements that make up a high performing team, like having a team mind, having team emotion, having team kind of leadership and all of those elements. I think every leader needs to be able to hone their skills in that area. But I’m imagining when you’re doing a job share, it kind of just up levels your leadership, as you say, taking the time to work on the culture, taking the time to reflect on actually how are we working? Are we high performing? What are the bits that we’re not paying attention to? That’s really good practice in organizations for any leader, but really, it’s kind of put under a magnifying glass with job sharing.

Chloe Fletcher [00:35:05]:
I think it’s about taking the time to do that contracting, and as you said, they’re all just absolutely brilliant behaviors of a great leader that often like fall by the wayside because people don’t have the time for it. But you know, the skills that Laura taught before of kind of like the trust piece, you know, we do like a lot of work with our peers on the trust equation, having brilliant communication, really understanding your goals, really being aligned on what is important. And I think like even like the weekly handover drives amazing prioritization because each week you reflect on what do we need to achieve, what have we achieved and where we’re going to put our efforts. And that ultimately leads to much better productivity as a pair because you are managing on a weekly basis your outputs, which are just all brilliant behaviours of kind of a leader, but often things that don’t get forced because the pace of work just gets in the way. But I think that weekly handover was such a key point when we were in Asda because that reflection of well, what are we going to prioritize as a pair versus our goals had to happen every week and meant that we delivered like a really high level of service in both of our roles when we were in Asda.

Nicky Lowe [00:36:19]:
Yeah, that makes sense. And I was just reflecting on I, over the last couple of years have built my team around me. And it’s not job share, but just the standard operating procedures that we’ve put in the way in which we communicate, the way in which we track our kind of activity and our outcomes has just upleveled our business from me being like this individual contributor that could get by and I can completely relate to it. Chloe about well, I’ll manage my inbox however, and I know what I’m doing to now. Oh, I’ve got a team that go into my inbox. They need to know where I’m at, what I’ve done and how it just hones all of your skills in a but I can imagine within a job share, it just takes it to a whole different level. So in terms of employer perception. So somebody listening to this podcast that is in an organisation and may have the ability to influence a job share strategy, what might be some of the concerns that they’ve got and what might they need to hear from you in terms of promoting the benefits to go? Actually I’ve listened to this podcast and I think this might be of interest to us because what would you want to say to them?

Chloe Fletcher [00:37:30]:
Yeah, I think as we’ve probably talked about, job sharing is a fairly new and unknown way of working. So often what that leads to in organizations is concerns that come from that lack of understanding and the lack of exposure to that way of working. So I think the most important thing is education. And we find that kind of engaging leadership and line manager, that’s a really key thing to kind of creating successful job shares, because often there’s a perception in a business that, well, job sharing doesn’t work, and that is often because there’s been a job share that may have been as kind of Laura said, you know, smashed together because two people were returning from maternity whatever, and therefore it hasn’t worked once and therefore people have written it off. But this comes back to the intentionality of you need to invest in a job share to make it a success. And so what we particularly help organizations with is understanding how do you need to invest in the pairs and job shares to make them thrive. So education on the benefits, that is a key part. Talking about employee retention, the gender equity piece that we’ve talked about, creating a more diverse talent pool, we often talk about unicorn talent.

Chloe Fletcher [00:38:49]:
So a unicorn, you know, creating an employee that you could never find in the market because you’ve got two sets of skills that you bring together that combine to make magic in one employee, the resulting increased productivity that you get from a job share. So we do a lot of education around. Well, this is why job sharing is absolutely brilliant and how it could fit into your strategy of, you know, if you’re looking to drive more gender equity within your organization, if you’re looking for a way to retain kind of potentially people who are on the glide path to retirement, so you’re looking to retain some of that knowledge where you’ve got people that may not want to drop out of the workforce, you know, talking about it as a solution for people with disabilities or who are impacted in not able to work full time because of health issues, talking about how this could be used for Gen Z, you know, people who want portfolio careers. So really starting to educate leaders as to looking at it through a different lens, being able to really understand the benefits, and then we can really help with the practicalities of often people think about, well, who can job share? You know, how do you match a pair? What do you need to do to set them up for success? How do you understand if a job can be shared? A lot of the questions that we’ve covered in this podcast, and that’s where we help organizations do the practicalities and almost tell you those things help you with our tool to kind of optimize a role, really look practically at, well, if you’re going to do this role, what would you need to do to be able to job share it. And we almost forensically look at a role and say, does it have a lot of stakeholder management? Does it have a lot of team management? Do you have to make complex decisions, you know, quickly, and then give practical solutions to the things that you need to put in place to make that success? So I think, like, for people who are thinking about it, I would think, you know, this is a great solution to help drive gender equity in your organization. But you do need to think about how it fits into your talent strategy and how it fits into your cycle of talent management so that it becomes something that your organization, your line managers, your leadership offer as a credible solution, rather than it just being kind of something that is side of desk, not thought through properly, and it can be offered to employees with the right level of support.

Nicky Lowe [00:41:21]:
Brilliant. I love that. And I love how your services address all of the practicalities, but the systemic stuff as well. So if somebody’s listening going, this all sounds great, what might be the first step they could take? Perhaps the first step if they are an individual that might want to participate in a job share. And the first step somebody might take that if they are either a leader or in kind of the people function that go, actually, we want to take a first step to exploring whether we can make this work in our organization. What advice would you offer?

Nicky Lowe [00:41:53]:
Yeah, I think part of our mission at the job share revolution is to, like I said, take a bit of the burden away from the individuals. So we really, really encourage HR professionals, leaders to kind of walk forward on this and to implement programs within their organization to make it really easy for the individuals to access it. So, you know, we’d kind of recommend, you know, get in touch, have a look on our website and maybe have a look on our LinkedIn as well at some of the practical first steps you can take as an organization. I mean, even just advertising your roles, internal and external, as open to job share is a brilliant first step. And we know there’s some research out of Zurich that said, when they did that, they had a significant uplift in applications from women and a significant uplift in women in leadership roles as well. So even just that would be my first small step for a HR professional or a leader is go for it and start talking to your people about whether that’s something they’d be interested in for individuals. My first step would be, you know, this is on the assumption that there isn’t a kind of full blown, highly visible, well articulated and communicated job share program. My first step would be, do a little bit of research.

Nicky Lowe [00:43:13]:
So lots of organisations have job share policies and may even have job share programs. They’re just not that well communicated. So I would start by having a look on your sort of intranet or wherever your policies are and see what the policy looks like. And then I would have a conversation with your line manager or your HR partner. I think, again, that depends on kind of cultural context, context and how your organisation operates. But if you feel happy to, I would open up a conversation with your line manager about this as an option and try and kind of explore it. Now, it depends very much on the cultural context of your organisation. Some organisations you might have to go in with a whole load of information to educate the line managers themselves and you might even need to have done a business case, something like that.

Nicky Lowe [00:44:04]:
But I think you can test the ground pretty well just by having a conversation and I would recommend that you do that. I think job sharing is becoming much more prevalent. You know, if you search for job share on LinkedIn, there are so many roles now advertised as job share. And I would say that’s changed even in the last three, four, five years, the prevalence has gone up. So this is definitely an option. And so my first, my recommendation would be, if you’re interested, kind of just go for it and start to have some conversations.

Nicky Lowe [00:44:35]:
Brilliant. There’s some really great practical steps in there. And as you said, I would recommend people check out all of your website and we’ll come on to that in a bit and where you are on social media. So in terms of you mentioned right at the beginning, Laura, about the future of work and how with AI and where the kind of, the evolution of the future of work is going, why or how do you see job sharing fitting into that? Why do you think job share working might be part of that future?

Chloe Fletcher [00:45:06]:
I think we are really seeing job sharing evolving as the world of work evolves. So I think originally job sharing was probably considered just a solution for working mums. But as we see the emergence of new ways of working and particularly new demands from employees, it’s taken on, you know, much more, kind of many more faces. So I guess what we’ve seen probably through the pandemic is people have seen there is an option to work in a different way and people have realized, I think, that, you know, there isn’t just, you don’t just have to work or, you know, do other things outside of work. There is a real possibility to start creating portfolio careers and that is, you know, something that we are definitely seeing more and more people who want to create a portfolio career and work in a different way. And particularly we’ve seen with the rise of Gen Z and people who are not going to just work in a way that everybody has already worked in, almost like a fight against a traditional way of working and a demand to work in a different way. And that’s where job sharing can really fit in, because it really starts to create possibilities of having a portfolio career working in a different way, doing different things. And it will be a way that allows organizations to retain Gen Z talent in their organizations when they start to see the demands from employees being very different to maybe how they were 20 years ago.

Chloe Fletcher [00:46:40]:
I know when people have, we’ve seen a lot of graduate intakes coming in, people have got different priorities. And I think that’s absolutely fantastic, that employees are starting to demand more from their employers. And I think that’s where job sharing fits in, because it allows a way for people to work in a part time way and really commit to an organization and really deliver for an organization, whilst also fulfilling all of things that they want to do outside of work. And I think that’s where we’ll see the evolution of job share as the traditional mold of work changes. And we don’t see people working in the nine to five, five days a week way. And I’m hoping, you know, they didn’t used to be a weekend and people probably would have never thought that the weekend would be a thing. But hopefully job sharing will be the next definition of a way of working, of it’s just normal people do it and they have several jobs and they, you know, have a really fulfilled life and career.

Nicky Lowe [00:47:41]:
Yeah. And as you were talking, what it made me also think about was one of my colleagues, I may have heard me say, I do work as a leadership development consultant for a large consultancy practice. And one of my colleagues, who’s head of research, spent a couple of years researching what is the future mindset for leaders. And the premise of her research that came out was that actually the future of leadership is so paradoxical in that we have to be caring, but we’ve also got to be ruthless in terms of prioritising. So Amy, my colleague who developed this work, has written a book called Ruthlessly Caring. But in the book there’s, I think there’s six different leadership mindset paradigm paradoxes. So how do we hold these distinctly? What can seem in conflict styles, preferences, ways of viewing the world? And that’s really difficult in one person. As you were talking, I’m like, oh my God.

Nicky Lowe [00:48:42]:
But job share. To have, as you say, that almost unicorn employee that has all of these different personality preferences, gifts, strengths, skills in one is a great way to be able to navigate the future of work if that’s the kind of mindsets that’s needed.

Nicky Lowe [00:48:57]:
Yeah, I think that’s so true. And I think you bring those different mindsets and you bring those different personality styles and then you also enhance them because you have someone to kind of bounce them off and, you know, take for example, one of us might be incredibly ruthless and one of us might be incredibly caring and somehow you’re going to bring that together in something that is, is more than the sum of the parts. And I think that’s one of the big things about job sharing, is that the whole is much more than the sum of the parts on so many different angles. And I think that’s kind of one of the other ones. That book sounds fabulous. I have a very long list. Yeah, I’ve got such a long list of books to read. It’s never ending, but that one’s going on it.

Nicky Lowe [00:49:44]:
So finally we’ve covered so much. But if there was just one thing that somebody listening to this conversation about job sharing, you’d want them to take away. What’s that one thing?

Nicky Lowe [00:49:55]:
I think for me it would be like job sharing changed my life and I think it can also change organisations. I really do think this way of working has the power to transform both organisations and individuals. And I think that’s what kind of gets us out of bed every morning. Because we are as interested in driving organizations forward and creating value for organisations as we are in kind of enabling individuals to live their best lives. And I think job sharing really does have the power to do both of those things. So we’re very excited about the future.

Nicky Lowe [00:50:30]:
I love that. So where can people find out more about you, your work and what you can do to support them?

Chloe Fletcher [00:50:37]:
Yes, if people check out our LinkedIn page. So it’s under the job share revolution. And we also have a website which is www. Dot thejobsharerevolution dot co dot UK. And you can find ways to contact us through that if you’re interested in finding out more.

Nicky Lowe [00:50:54]:
Brilliant. And I also know you’re starting your own podcast as well, where I’m assuming people can find out more about you and other people that are kind of doing job share. So yeah, I’ll put all the, the details of that in the show notes.

Nicky Lowe [00:51:08]:
Oh, brilliant. Thank you. Because what we found when we, when we first job shared. We found that we, we couldn’t find anyone else. We found we did manage to find a network, but we just wanted to hear stories and get inspiration. So that’s the reason behind the pod, our podcast. And we took some great inspiration from you, Nikki, as well, to just go on and do it. But we’re hoping that will help amplify the stories and the voices so that people feel kind of less alone when they’re job sharing and they know that, you know, other people have been through that as well.

Nicky Lowe [00:51:43]:
And some of the challenges and there’s great ways to kind of work through some of the challenges and the solutions and the benefits are just so great on the other side. So we’re really excited about that.

Nicky Lowe [00:51:51]:
No, I think it’s great that you’re creating a platform to share more of that. So thank you. And it just leads me to say thank you both. Thank you, Laura. Thank you, Chloe, for not only coming on and sharing your story and the work that you do, but also for what you’re doing in the world of work to really support humans, but particularly us working mums. So thank you.

Nicky Lowe [00:52:13]:
Oh, it’s been brilliant. Thank you.

Chloe Fletcher [00:52:15]:
Thanks for having us. Be great to chat.

Nicky Lowe [00:52:19]:
If you’ve enjoyed this episode of Wisdom for working mums, please share it on social media and with your friends and family. I’d love to connect with you too. So if you head over to nicky@wisdomforworkingmums.co.uk you’ll find a link on how to do this. And if you love the show and really want to support it, please go to iTunes, write a review and subscribe. You’ll be helping another working mum find this resource too. Thanks so much for listening.