Kerry Fallon Horgan is a featured expert in Clarissa Bye's article on job-sharing in the Sun-Herald newspaper (edited version)

Joining Forces by Clarissa Bye

Carol Griffin has a high-powered career in job recruitment. She gets paid well and her friends are envious of her, mainly because she job-shares. Griffin splits her job, her clients and hourly salary with co-worker Sharon Sorensen. Because they both work three days a week (with one day overlapping), they divide their commissions exactly down the middle.

"We've been doing it for three years and it's worked out really well," Griffin said. Griffin and Sorensen work at the progressive recruitment firm Jonathan Wren in Parramatta and spend their days matching candidates with jobs in the accounting field, interviewing job seekers and dealing with clients. It's the sort of job that just can't be done by one person working part-time, as someone needs to be there every day. Griffin works Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and Sorensen (who has three children) works Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. They have separate desks and computers and spend their overlapping day briefing each other in detail, as well as visiting clients and planning future assignments. Griffin said: "An advantage to the employer is staff absolutely treasure their jobs and work harder," Griffin said.

Job-sharing is not just for parents with kids. Many employees choose it because they need to study, attend courses, help care for other family members such as elderly parents or just to scale back their lives.

The key difference with job-sharing and part-time work is that the two employees are doing essentially the same job during the week, not two separate jobs.

Two staff members at the office of Federal Member of Parliament for the seat of Sydney Tanya Plibersek share one job. One works four short days and the other 31/2 longer days. They work as problem solvers, dealing with electorate queries and chasing up government bureaucracies to help constituents.

"They are worth lots more than I can pay," Plibersek said. "I'm lucky that because of their family commitments they want to work this way and I get the bonus of having them."

Griffin says clear lines of communication and the ability to get along are crucial to job-sharing

Much touted in the 1980s as a way of the future, job-sharing has been slower to take off than initially thought. The latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (the Working Arrangements 2000 report), show that nationally 165,300 women job-share and 23,000 men do so - out of a workforce of about 7.4 million.

It sounds a lot, but consider how many work part-time; 1.54 million women and 566,000 men. For Women with children, part-time has become the standard working model with 36 per cent of married women with kids now working part-time…

Many employers still baulk at job-sharing arrangements, fearful that it will be too difficult to manage or result in extra costs.

Kerry Fallon Horgan, who runs Flexibility At Work, a Sydney-based work/life consultancy, said: "The main barrier is a lack of understanding of the real bottom line benefits of a successful job-sharing arrangement."

She cites the example in the US of the Pella Corporation, a manufacturing business that found absenteeism dropped by 81 pc when it introduced the option of job-sharing for the production line workers. Overstaffing was also eliminated.

"Some employers object to job-sharing as it can mean more than one person to accommodate in the office and to supervise," she said. "There can also be other challenges such as the need for conflict resolution if the job sharers have opposing views on issues affecting the role. But when job-sharing is managed well, the benefits far outweigh the costs."

Fallon Horgan said benefits included the retention of highly skilled employees, attracting the best employees from a wider talent pool, improved employee commitment and morale and increased productivity.

A report prepared for the Chifley Research Foundation said tension between work and families in Australia is not being well managed.

Authors Dr John Buchanan and Dr Louise Thornthwaite said the move to longer working hours, had contributed to this.

They found that very few of the enterprise bargaining agreements made in the late 1990s included any provision for job-sharing or family-friendly policies.

For advise on how to implement and manage job-sharing and other flexible work arrangements contact Kerry Fallon Horgan on telephone 612 9402 4741

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Sun-Herald Newspaper article on March 17, 2002