Hannah Story and Zoe Duffy, pictured here at Story's wedding in 2017, the year they started job sharing as senior producers at TVNZ's Seven Sharp.
Whatever happened to job sharing? With Covid knocking the standard 40-hours-in-the-office model out of the arena, recruitment and employment experts say workers should be asking for arrangements that suit them. Jane Phare reports.
When Hannah Story and Zoe Duffy first suggested to TVNZ that they job-share a senior producer role at Seven Sharp, there was an initial hesitation.
“They weren’t sure if it would work,” Story says. “It hadn’t really been done at that point but then they agreed to give it a go.”
That was seven years ago, Story working three days a week with Hilary Barry and the team, and Duffy working two.
Although the job-sharing arrangement was never officially on trial, Story and Duffy worked hard to make sure their communication and handovers were faultless.
“It felt like we needed to prove that this could work.”
For Story, mother to three children including a 3-year-old, and Duffy, a mother of two, the arrangement was perfect.
Neither wanted to be away from their families for five evenings in a row.
“It was a great balance for us,” she says. “It allowed us to have the morning to get them ready for school.”
The two women are friends from way back, both working as full-time producers at TV3 before they had children. Looking for work after parental leave and the canning of Campbell Live, they spotted a full-time position at Seven Sharp and put a job-sharing proposal to the executive producer.
“We have loved it,” Story says.” It has worked for us because we love the 7pm slot but we knew with those hours we would never see our children if we were to do that job full-time.”
Duffy describes Story as her “work wife”, saying she couldn’t have imagined working without her.
“Job sharing with Hannah has been an absolute game-changer. Our complementary skills and shared humour make every challenge a breeze. We’ve been told that you get two for the price of one with us, as our investment in the role is more than just a job when you’re sharing with a friend.”
Now the dream team is about to come to an end with Duffy resigning from TVNZ to work in a family business from her home north of Auckland. The two women have not ruled out linking up again in the future.
Story is a fan of job sharing, pointing out that the arrangement brought in two sets of skills and double the energy.
“I think companies get great value and productivity from job-sharing. After working hard for three days, you then get Zoe coming into the office energised with fresh, creative ideas, the advantage of two minds working as one.”
Job sharing is showing up on the political scene too. Two Melbourne women have announced they want to run for Australia’s federal parliament next year as a single candidate, job sharing week and week about.
Life-long friends Lucy Bradlow, a political communications specialist and former lawyer Bronwen Bock, an investment banker, say they will split the duties and time away in Canberra, handing over to the other at the end of each week.
Eyebrows were raised in the New Zealand political scene when Prime Minister Christopher Luxon announced last year that NZ First leader Winston Peters and Act leader David Seymour would share the role of Deputy Prime Minister.
It was something considered unthinkable just a few years earlier: In 2015 a Herald reporter caused a ripple of laughter in a press conference when he asked then Prime Minister John Key if he could ever see a job-share situation with Peters if NZ First held the balance of power in the next election.
“No chance,” Key said. “It would be totally unacceptable to the New Zealand public.”
Then Labour leader Andrew Little also shunned the idea saying he didn’t think New Zealand would accept “a state of musical chairs in the role of Prime Minister”.
Recruitment agencies and worker advocates recommend job sharing as a way to keep parents - and others who can’t work full-time - in highly skilled roles, developing their career paths. Alongside the more popular part-time and flexi-time arrangements, job sharing should be an option, they say. And it’s up to workers to suggest it.
Job sharing is provided for under the Employment Relations (Flexible Working Arrangements) Amendment Act 2007 which allows workers to put a proposal to an employer, who is obliged to consider it. Employers can refuse on a number of grounds including detrimental impact on quality, performance or the ability to meet customer demand, and the burden of additional costs.
Industry experts say some employers have a negative mindset about job sharing, relegating it to the “too hard” basket. Issues could include managing two employees covering one full-time role, lack of accountability, lack of communication, or one employee missing a deadline and blaming the other. There can also be a fear that restructuring could be more complicated.
On the other hand, advantages for the employer include increased productivity, double the experience and industry knowledge, and less sick leave or missed meetings because work hours and days can be juggled between the two workers.
Kate McCleery runs the website Job Sharing NZ, and says none of the perceived problems are insurmountable. The Ōrewa mother of two teenagers launched the platform in 2015 after struggling to find roles that capitalised on her experience and skillset following the birth of her two sons.
The job-sharing toolkits on her website, which receive 20,000 hits a month and many more on social media, are there to help both employers and employees through the process. McCleery points out that in times of recession, having two sets of skills for the price of one is a good deal.
Jobs for Mums co-founder Mela Lush agrees, citing a job-shared marketing manager role as an example.
“You might have a digital specialist and a brand specialist [sharing the role]. That’s a huge benefit to the business in terms of productivity because of the two sets of skills for the same price.”
Lush, a single mother of two young children, launched the Jobs for Mums website nearly two years ago, partly as a social enterprise to encourage businesses to rethink how working weeks can be structured. Her aim is to help reduce “the motherhood penalty” that contributes to gender inequity in terms of income and career progression.
Employed in leadership roles before the birth of her children, Lush came up against changed attitudes once she was a mother.
“Just because I couldn’t do nine-to-five didn’t make me any less valuable,” she says. “People need to let go of the old rules that don’t serve everybody.”
She thinks all options should be on the table – school hours, work from home, hybrid options, flexi hours, glide time, and term-time employment.
Jobs for Mums is aimed at anyone who can’t work standard hours - including dads, she says.
Nearly 70% of the candidates on the Jobs for Mums site have tertiary qualifications or higher, and 73% have 10 years’ experience or more in their field.
“This is a highly skilled workforce that is looking for these [flexible] jobs.”
To that end, she’s working with employers like Fletcher Building, Fonterra and the Ministry of Social Development to create new employment pathways.
“We’re trying to create a movement for family-friendly employment that benefits society as a whole.”
Auckland recruitment specialist Janna Grant has advice for both workers and bosses. To workers, she says “ask your boss” and come up with a solution as to how a flexi-job can work.
“Be confident in your own abilities and your own value.”
To employers, she says “challenge yourselves” as to how a job could be done. What are the outcomes needed, how long will the work take and does it all need to be done in the office?
Grant, general manager of recruitment services for agency HainesAttract, says her own working week is a “mash up”, helping her balance being a mum to two primary-school children with her role.
She says that although the job market currently has an oversupply of candidates, when the job market tightens, employers will need to be open to different options if they want to attract and retain skilled staff.
When that pressure on skills comes, people will “choose with their feet”, she says. Businesses and employers who are not flexible will struggle to find people and will need to increase salaries and benefits to counter the competition.
McCleery, who now works full-time heading AMP’s digital marketing team,
was typical of a young mother who went back to work part-time but found herself in junior roles. Pre motherhood she worked as a product development manager with Genesis Energy and later in a senior role with British energy multinational Centrica in the UK. Wanting to apply for a more senior role, McCleery set about finding a work colleague, someone with whom she could job share.
“It struck me that there was this cohort of women, highly skilled and highly motivated. But people weren’t even putting the idea of job sharing on the table.”
She likens Job Sharing NZ to an online work dating platform where people can connect and match their skills in a safe way. Personal information is not shared and McCleery does not have access to messages between the users.
She decided against turning the site into a money-making venture, now running it as a community service. Needing to earn a salary she went back to full-time work in 2016. However, McCleery says she would love to be able to job share now and has used her job-sharing platform to search for work partners but so far hasn’t found the right match.
Auckland employment lawyer Gerard Elwell says job-sharing roles tend to come about at the initiative of the employee, or prospective employee rather than advertised by employers. However, he concedes that not everyone is a fan of arrangement.
He took on a job-sharing employment dispute earlier this year, rare he says. The two women had successfully shared a role, working from home, for a number of years.
“There’s no issues at all with their performance. They’re incredibly conscientious. They’ve barely taken a day of sick leave since they started, they’re committed to the business because it offered them that flexibility.”
A new CEO arrived, disestablished the job-sharing role and replaced it with a single full-time role based in the office.
“I see it as unfair on two very loyal, hard-working people who have had no performance issues.”
Most large organisations and businesses offer job sharing although they say they don’t have many examples.
Westpac’s head of human resources operations Ann Jensen says some employees job share, and it’s been a successful option for some workers at Mitre10 New Zealand too.
Rocket Lab doesn’t have any job-sharing roles because of the pace of change there, communications director Morgan Connaughton told the Herald.
“Best-laid plans can be out of date just a couple of hours later, so that would make it difficult for someone to pick up where someone else left off.”
Jane Phare is a senior Auckland-based business, features and investigations journalist, former assistant editor of NZ Herald and former editor of the Weekend Herald and Viva.
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