Why should you as an employer promote job sharing
Job sharing is still a pretty new idea in the grand scheme of things. It’s only within recent years that we’ve seen bigger companies (like KPMG for example) adopt the idea. It’s a pretty radical change from you as the businesses point of view, switching away from the 9-5 Monday – Friday model. However, the benefits aren’t only reaped by the employees, there’s many reasons to promote job sharing within your company.
Happier staff
Most benefits to your business will come from your happier staff. This all important factor is going to be responsible for seeing an increase in productivity in all other areas of your business.
When I came out of collage I wanted to get straight into work, and the first place that would take me was a retail store. Staff morale wasn’t exactly high and they seemed to have a revolving door policy on employment. Staff retention was poor and they must have spent a small fortune on training and re-training staff. No steps were taken to address the issue of staff morale and things went on the way they were for years... they’re closed now.
Your staff are what keep your business going from day to day, and happy staff members are productive staff members. Allowing your staff the opportunity to work more flexibly is only going to help your staff feel good about where they work. This will let them get a better balance between their work lives and taking care of their children, other family members or whatever it is they need to do. This will mean you have a team with higher moral, higher retention rates and lower expenditure on recruitment.
Wider choice of applicants
The standard 9 – 5 weekday job is going to attract applicants, of course it will, if it didn’t our economy would have ground to a halt years ago. The problem is that these positions don’t cater to anyone with other responsibilities within these hours. This can be an issue for you as these people with other responsibilities are sometimes the best person for your business.
Allowing your employees a more flexible system, be that flexible hours or job sharing, will open the doors to hundreds of new capable applicants, applicants that otherwise wouldn’t have been able to accept an offer from you. Not only will you have more diverse group to choose from, in the case of a job share, picking two individuals for a single job will mean you have the experience and strengths of multiple people to rely on while they re-enforce each other.
Making your jobs more accessible means that you’re more likely to have your dream applicant apply. Making the role more appealing will benefit both you and your business.
Promoting teamwork
In an environment where responsibility is shared, it’s in everyone’s best interests to work together and the flexibility allows everyone to get the most from the job. Someone who needs to take a little extra time off for whatever reason can rest easy in the knowledge that their team will pick up the slack while giving others the opportunity to pick up some extra hours.
This is another lesson I learned from my days in retail. In one of the smaller stores I worked in, we all had a shared level of responsibility, and no one ever wanted to let anyone else down. From the manager all the way down the 4 hour weekend girl, we all made knew exactly what we needed to do to keep the store ticking over. It’s the same mentality that applies to a job share, it’s not just your job, it’s “our” job. This level of teamwork is not only great for productivity but it’s great to bring the team together, keeping morale high and your employees engaged.
Legalities
As of June 2014 any employee that has worked for an employer for a continuous 26 weeks has the right to request flexible working arrangements. Employers are expected to deal with this reasonably and give full consideration to the request. For all the reasons outlined above, I urge you to take employees requests seriously, you won’t only be benefiting them, you’ll benefit yourselves in the long run too.
If you’re looking for a job to share partner, or if your employee is looking for someone to share with, make sure you give us at ShareYourJob.com a look. We can help you find the perfect balance between your home and work life.
Image credit to http://www.capitaeducation.co.uk/
