Morecambe and Wise, Marie and Pierre Curie, Dolce and Gabbana… history tells us that two heads can often be better than one. So, can a job share deliver more than a sum of its two parts?
Julia Brook and Niki Slaughter are in no doubt it can. The pair share a key human resources position at Ford Motor Company, having set themselves up as a partnership in 2012 and now combining more than 40 years’ HR experience into a single role.
While the majority of job shares involve two separate hires, Julia and Niki offer themselves as a ready-made, job-share package, wherever that takes them on their career ladder.
Recently, they were appointed Senior HR Business Partner for Software, Technology and New Business Platforms – a critical position that involves the recruitment and retention of 200 software staff at Ford’s innovation office in Stratford, east London, and puts them on the frontline of the massive changes taking place within the company and the wider automotive and mobility sector.
Niki says: “We’ve found that, as we’ve worked with different parts of the business, more people have had their eyes opened to the benefits of a job share. You get two different people’s perspective, two different people’s ideas and creativity, and two different sets of skills as well, so you actually get a lot more than one piece of headcount.
“We also have different strengths. Julia will tend to be the creative one with all the ideas, which is great. And I tend to be the practical one thinking about, ‘How are we going to do that?’. But because Julia thinks differently to me, that then makes me think differently. We both help each other grow and we coach each other without even needing to do it explicitly.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the idea of flexible working across multiple sectors, with job-sharing now an accepted, integral element of many workplace cultures.
But, as both of job partners and HR specialists, Niki and Julia know the secret of a successful job share is much more than simply splitting a full-time role into two.
Julia says: “Job shares are often referred to as job shares when actually they are just two people doing two different parts of a particular role. For example, somebody might take marketing and sales as a customer group and the other might take IT as a customer group and then call it a job share, which isn’t quite the same as our approach”.
“Niki and I have one customer group and we do identical roles. So, I’ve got a paper I’m working on at the moment, and Niki will finish it. I might write a presentation and Niki will deliver it. The work just flows seamlessly through the week.
“We’re counted as half a head each, so one person in total, but we have the privilege of each working three days a week. I do Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Niki does Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. We spent a lot of Wednesday making sure that knowledge transfer happens between us.”
Niki adds: “There’s a view that you can just put two people together in a job share and it’ll work but you definitely need some share values & approaches. We did quite a bit of research when we were setting ourselves up about how this could work well and what we needed to do differently to how we would normally operate.
“We spent time talking to other job sharers in the company and we also thought about how we could operate that wouldn’t put undue pressure on each other and, from a customer’s perspective, to ensure they didn’t lose continuity.
“We don’t want people to have to schedule two meetings with us to have to explain something to Julia on a Monday and me again on a Friday. Our ultimate goal is to make it completely seamless.”
Both women are mothers-of-two and opted for part-time working after returning from maternity leave. Their partnership was born nine years ago when they presented themselves as a job share for the role of HR Manager for Ford’s European IT organisation.
After following different paths for a few years, they rekindled their partnership in 2018, tasked with building a new team for the company’s European Mobility and Connectivity division. Both are committed to remaining as a job share, even when they no longer have child-caring responsibilities.
The duo were distant work colleagues rather than friends when they first came together and say one of the secrets of their working relationship is keeping things on a professional footing. Another is abandoning any ego and being a team player.
Niki says: “You have to be quite unselfish in a job share because there will be things that Julia has prepped and then I get to deliver it because it’s on my day. It’s swings and roundabouts.
“If your focused on what you as an individual achieve or deliver, that’ll create tension and make it a very uneven relationship. You need to think about what you can achieve together and not compete against each other. You can be collectively competitive but not individually, otherwise it’s a recipe for disaster.”
The two women are also collectively ambitious. Being promoted as a job-share team is definitely on the agenda if and when an opportunity arises – something that would have been unthinkable in the early days of flexible working.
Julia and Niki’s manager, Steve Evison, HR Director Manufacturing, Western Europe & MEA at Ford Motor Company, said: “Julia and Niki’s job share is a highly effective working partnership that’s a cultural beacon for flexible working arrangements within Ford. As they began their first job-share they sought advice from colleagues who’d job shared, and they are now themselves a role model for others to follow. They’ve defined a new way of working – offering and operating a seamless job share that is highly appreciated within the HR organization and with our internal customers.”
Julia says: “Ford has historically been very good at accommodating part-time requests but when Niki and I first job-shared, people assumed that if you were part time, you were almost on the bench for a five-year period or however long you were going to work part- time until your kids were old enough and you came back full time. So, people’s careers could stall.
“We tended to be given project work and when you are then considered for promotion, you’ve not done the really challenging roles and are therefore not a prime candidate for promotion.
“But now the boundaries have shifted. Our job share has given us the opportunity to take on big, challenging jobs that are fully developmental and which play a key role in the business, so we’re viewed as capable as our full-time colleagues. We’ve both been promoted since we’ve been part-time job-sharers which is great progress.”
Niki adds: “One of the things we’re trying to do is to educate people on our capability as a job share and to make sure we’re at least on people’s lists to be considered for promotion.
“There’s still a bit of a mental block about part-timers in the workplace and a feeling that they are maybe not as career-hungry who have reached where they want to reach because they have work-life balance needs and caring responsibilities.
“We are pushing constantly to ask people not to pigeon-hole us.”
“We’re keen to be ambassadors for job shares both inside our current organisation and outside, particularly given we’ve had some great opportunities for progression as part-time, job-sharing women!”
