The low-down on job-sharing
The pandemic has created a variety of opportunities for, and challenges to, the ways in which people work. Therefore, in the spirit of this, we interviewed Julia Hemmings, a lawyer (now Partner) at Baker McKenzie, who took up the opportunity to do a job-share in 2013 after coming back from maternity leave, when this was still quite a new way of working.
In 2019, Julia and her job-share partner, Helen Brown, were made Partners at the firm – the first-ever job-share lawyers to be promoted to partnership at a major law firm. Here’s what she has learned from that experience:
1. What made you decide to embark on a job-share?
"Back in 2013, on return from my second maternity leave, I was working three days a week as an associate, and it was increasingly difficult to fit my working week into the three days. I was either under-utilised or over-utilised which was difficult for either me or the leadership team – so we needed to find a solution. Helen was also looking to move back into a fee-earning role on a part-time basis so the natural solution was to try a job-share. This gave us a dedicated handover for our non-working days, without impacting anyone else in the team, and also allowed us to be fully utilised across the week.”
2. What were the advantages of job-sharing that surprised you?
“We’ve been job-sharing for 8 years now - so it's been going for a long time, and I think my overall impression is how beneficial the job-share has been from a teaming perspective. From the outset, we were able to put our heads together and bounce ideas off each other; if one of us came across a stumbling block, there were two of us there looking to fix it. We had ideas about how to build our practice and development opportunities, and which directions to take it in. It was, for us, the perfect forum to be able to retain our legal skills, stay in a job that we really enjoyed, and grow and move forward. So that was an unexpected benefit. Initially I was just looking for a way to continue to work flexibly, but it became much more than that.”
3. What have you found most challenging?
“I suppose there was initial hesitation about how open and transparent we should be about our arrangement and whether it would be an issue for our clients. When we did tell clients about it, as we did early on, it was great that they were so open and receptive to it. The clients we work with are forward-thinking and innovative and lots of them were already working in an agile way and running job-shares at senior levels. At that time the legal industry was slightly behind on this kind of flexible, agile working. We’ve come a long way now.”
4. You were one of the only people doing a job-share in your firm when you started, is that still the case?
“There are lots of job-shares now at Baker McKenzie - it's really progressive; so much has changed since 2013. We have job-shares in every role: associates, PAs, professional business services. We also have a job-share forum for people to share best practice and encourage others to consider it as an option.”
5. What has been the impact on the company culture of the spread of job-shares?
“I think it's opened up the conversation generally as to how our people can work in a different working pattern. A law firm is a really demanding environment to work in but I think Baker McKenzie is known for wanting to its people to be happy and feel supported at work; the firm has always been really open to having conversations about how that might look. Even before the pandemic, the firm was keen to offer flexible working - which made the transition last year to remote working on a full-time basis much smoother. More recently, the firm has increased its commitment to exploring avenues for people to work on a more agile basis as the office opens up more widely.”
6. What do you know now about job sharing that you would have liked to have known when you were just about to start?
"I have mentored a few people across different sectors who have been applying for job-shares within their organisations and there is one common theme that comes across time and again when I'm talking them through their applications and helping them prepare for their flexible working interviews - you don't need to be apologetic about it. Often when people apply for the role and fill in the forms, they feel like the company is doing them a favour if they say yes. Actually, when I look at the benefits of job sharing, having two people who are able to put in lots of energy, are equally invested in the role, really want to make it work, and have time away from their desk doing something else during the working week before they come back with renewed enthusiasm – it’s super productive. And of course the added benefit for companies is the retention of top talent that they might otherwise have lost.”
7. What advice would you give for other people looking to create a new role or change their working pattern?
“I would say be brave. And don't drive yourself mad agonizing over the “What ifs” - ‘is this the right person?’ ‘is this going to work?’ ‘are there going to be problems?’. It doesn't have to be your forever solution; for some people job-sharing might just fit the gap for two people that need it for a year to help them through a bumpy patch. I think the opportunity that the pandemic has offered of working remotely, working flexibility or working in a different pattern has allowed us to be brave and try new things. And I hope that our story shows that it is worth starting that conversation.”