Bidiversity

Guest blog by Andrea & Shelley, successful jobshare team from Hewlett Packard.

Andrea and I have been job sharing for close to 3 years now. Before that we both worked part-time which was great, but once we started jobsharing, we quickly realized the benefits. Working 3 days a week we never felt like we were able to respond quick enough to customer requests and we were both working on our days off.

Andrea’s manager at the time suggested she find a jobshare partner to cover the workload. We were fortunate that we didn’t have to sell Andrea’s manager on the jobshare concept, but we still wanted to ensure success, so we put together a jobshare proposal. First we interviewed other jobshare teams to learn best practices. We asked a lot of questions… how did they manage their work days, vacation time, email, voicemail, did they have their own cube or did they share, did they have separate performance reviews and rankings or shared, etc.

After these interviews we talked about what would work best for the two of us, as well as how to make it seamless to our partners and our manager. We then documented a proposal, which we reviewed with our manager, before we started. All this pre-work and planning we really think has helped us develop a structure that has been critical to our success. We wanted to share a few of the tools and tips that have worked especially well for us.

1. Shared Email and Voicemail: having shared acounts is key to making a jobshare seamless. Our customers don’t have to remember who is working that day. Sometimes our customers forget we are two people and that’s exactly what we want to happen.

2. Colour Coded Email Flags: Each day as we send and receive email we color code the messages. This color coding allows us to keep each other informed and know what still needs to be done. For example, if I want Andrea to just be informed, I code it blue. For emails that require immediate action, we code it Red. For emails we’d like to discuss, we code it green. The color codes are a great tool even for an individual contributor, but a lifesaver for a job-share team.

3. Daily Log: We have created a Daily Log that is a Word Doc with a list of Current Projects and Meeting Notes. At the end of our work week (Wed for Andrea; Fri for Shelley), we update the log with the progress on each project and notes from meetings. New info is coded in blue so we can quickly review. This process takes about 20 min at the end of our work week. The log is really helpful in jumpstarting our week – gets us up to speed quickly on all the key projects and it’s also a great record of key accomplishments when it’s time for performance reviews.

Source: Flexworks Connection