For many years, the government, education, and healthcare industries have embraced job sharing. Job sharing is now becoming more frequent accross a wider spectrum of industries as diversity, health, and future skilling rise up the list of corporate concerns.
Over a period of 18 months, Roleshare conducted qualitative interviews of senior job sharers, HR leaders, and people managers. What Roleshare discovered and compiled was an astounding list of unique benefits only job sharing can bring to both businesses and employees. Listen to some of those interviews on the Talk Roleshare podcast.
According to the CIPD, flexible workers, and that means job sharers too, are more likely to be engaged, which can reduce staff turnover by 87%. And in the UK Civil Service they found people who job share have a 11% higher level of wellbeing over other ways of working. When people of diverse perspectives and experience work together that brings diversity of thought. In a job share this diversity of thought is commonplace in roles that would normally be siloed. According to Deloitte, diverse teams are 6x more innovative and McKinsey suggests greater diversity could add £150 billion a year to the UK economy by 2025.
When it comes to performance people who job share are accountable to one another and, many job share interviewees stated, job sharing elevated their individual performance levels and communication standards. The job sharers manage themselves which actually means less work for the manager, and because two people know the job if one is away or leaves the company there is still continuity.
With skilled workers expected to be in short supply in comparison to demand over the next 10 years, it's worth highlighting the benefits of job sharing here too. When people job share they bring a wider depth of skills and broader experience into a role. These skills are passed on though the job sharers in the natural learning cycle - peer to peer learning. This is a means to insure utility skills for the company and for the job sharers to grow and learn new skills too.
Last but not least, when companies proactively offer job sharing, by opening full time roles to job share candidates, they are surfacing talent who would not have applied for the traditional full time role, simply because they don't fit that "full-time" mould. Also, companies are often searching for that "unicorn" talent who can do design and analytics, for example. Hard to find. But with a job share that's absolutely possible - expected, in fact!
So there you have it loads of meaningful and suprising benefits of job sharing. It's a simple idea with big impact.
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