Work Deconstructed
What if work flexibility meant sharing your job equally with a partner?
In the future normal, the organizations willing to rethink their longest held assumptions about work and to embrace the heavily demanded new arrangements such as job sharing will be the ones who can attract and retain the best talent and become the envy of their industry.
The Trend
What Work Deconstructed Means
Flexibility is moving past the question of where people work to how a job is divided in the first place, including two people sharing a single role. Around 40 percent of Fortune 100 companies offer job sharing, yet fewer than 3 percent of their employees actually do it, and most arrangements happen by accident rather than design. In the future normal, organizations that actively promote job sharing and other twists on traditional work structures will attract the best talent and earn deeper loyalty than more restrictive cultures.
The Instigator
Zurich Insurance
From March 2019 to February 2020, working with the UK government’s Behavioural Insights Team, Zurich advertised every open position as part time, full time or job share. Applications from women for management roles rose 16 percent, the number of women hired into senior positions rose by a third, and total applications from both men and women doubled. As HR head Steve Collinson put it, the results came from adding six words to their job adverts.
Imagining The Future Normal
3 Questions To Ask
About Work Deconstructed
- 1
How will AI make the logistics of job-sharing easier?
Coordination overhead and effective communication are job-sharing’s biggest barriers. AI tools for meeting transcriptions, personalized handover notes, and smart summaries can help. As these tools evolve, job-sharers will be able to stay better informed about the context of decisions made in their absence, reducing the risk of things falling through the cracks during transitions.
- 2
Could AI revolutionize how we find job-share partners?
The next biggest barrier is finding a compatible job-sharing partner, with most sharers traditionally relying on luck or existing networks. AI’s ability to serve as a matchmaking tool integrated with a trove of work data, will allow anyone to be matched to potential job-sharing colleagues with adjacent but complementary skills.
- 3
How does job sharing fit into the wider cultural shift around jobs and work?
Hybrid working, four-day weeks, fractional roles, AI automation, and the gig economy’s growth are all signs of a transition to workplace flexibility. As work becomes more liquid, this flexibility allows for higher retention and optimal results.
