S3 E52: Flexible work to prevent burnout
with job sharing expert and podcast host Karin Tischler
Key Takeways
Professionals who have been an unpaid care worker for many years were still struggling to return back to paid work due to the lack of flexible work opportunities beyond the entry level position, as well as the fact that they are unpaid care work was perceived to be a career gap. I then decided to create Emily's Past Consulting and to host the podcast, Job Sharing and Beyond.
So I honestly underestimated the change motherhood would bring. Everybody tells you your life is forever changed. And while I conceptually and intellectually, I understood that. I think I underestimated the emotional part that would change inside of me. And so the fact that here I have this little kid and, leaving a little child from in the morning at whatever, seven or eight until six o'clock at night in a childcare just was to be honest, heartbreaking to me.
One panic attack, my husband was traveling basically the entire week. And so here I was with two children, like an infant and another child under the age of three. And I was thinking to myself, what if I fall over? If something happens to me here, I am all by myself. And that really created that anxiety because my family is in Germany, and yeah, it was a completely different responsibility really. And that, stressed me out much more than looking at numbers and facing deadlines.
Job sharing typically is two people working one full-time job together. However, there are many combinations. The big aspect about job sharing is you form a relationship built on trust. So you know that your job sharing partner will do as good of its job as you would do. And so by doing this, you truly have work life balance. And I therefore feel that really helps with burn out.
The other aspect of it is that you have a sparring partner because job sharing not only works in like more entry level positions, but also as a co-leadership position. And so let's say you have to make a difficult personnel decision or some other decision that might be not that straightforward, having another person where you can basically act as sparing partners and that other person has a different background, maybe different complimentary skills will really put you much more at ease and, you can rely on that person having equally amount of interest in doing that job well. So I really think these things together make a huge difference.
There aren't enough role models. So some people simply don't know that job sharing exists. It makes people more nervous potentially to try things out because people think, oh my goodness, now I have to have two employees instead of one that I have to manage. Not realizing that if you have two people, it is actually easier. Because as I mentioned before, they use each other as sparring partners and therefore they will only go to their respective manager if they have something that they can't solve themselves. So that really helps.
You are able to attract more people when you are able to say you’re working flexible. Six additional words to their job ads and they were part-time flexible work and job sharing. And by doing that, they observed, not only did they increase substantially the female applicants, it was across all genders and it was also across all job levels. Once you make yourself known as a employer who is interested in offering flexible work, especially beyond the entry level position, people will come to you.
The other thing I feel what nowadays people still equate parttime as people who are searching for part-time might not be as career interested, not as ambitious. And that obviously couldn't further from the truth.
I would say especially in Europe with Switzerland, the UK and Germany job sharing is much more common, but also in some organizations part-time careers. There was an example of somebody who was a triathlete and was working part-time while doing all the training, but was able to move up in her career while doing that training.
And so I think that especially looking at the pandemic where you have a lot of people potentially having to opt out my belief is that more and more organizations are going to have to reevaluate why people would like to work for the organization. When somebody, is planning to retire and that person has a lot of knowledge having a intergenerational job sharing opportunity is perfect they can pass it along to somebody who might be more junior and the more junior person might have some technical skills or other insights that they can share.
So it's a win-win for both people. In Switzerland, for example, I'm aware of job shares who come from two different language backgrounds. So having a mother tongue speaker in German and the other one in French that's basically something that you can't really find in one person. So to me, that's, opportunities and looking at things differently that maybe are undervalued at this point in time.
And I strongly feel that we need to look much more at men and fathers because in my mind we can help elevate mothers and women and support them, but if we don't give fathers the opportunity to get engaged in care work and have flexible work opportunities at the same level as mothers, it won't get us to gender equality as quickly as otherwise.
Just not differentiating just making it a gender neutral parental leave. Because if you say the main parental leave person gets, let's say 20 weeks. And then the secondary, which most often is say a dad, gets two weeks. So psychologically, I feel that already sets it off at an imbalance right from the get go.
A senior male leader needs to talk about their parenting experience or it doesn't have to be parenting experience. It could be looking after elderly relatives. Do they talk about it saying I have to leave at three because I'm helping out my elderly relative, or I'm taking my child to a piano lesson. So by doing this, the higher on a leadership level, the easier it is then for a more junior person to say, okay, this person does it so I can do too.
To avoid that men become “helpers” only is to enable them to take care of the child by themself for a period of time, because it will force them to rely on themselves. And I think, this is not tomorrow, but in future generations, I feel very strongly that in a high school setting or, university setting, we need to have care work units or a practicum an internship maybe at a preschool or at an elderly pensioners home. Increase the value of care work for students early on to understand that this is true work. It is emotional work. It is exhausting emotionally and sometimes physically too. But I think too often men have very little interaction and might feel nervous about actually doing care work.
Norway in preschools, there are many more men who are preschool teachers. Which early on makes the children realize anybody could be a carer. So to them seeing a male preschool teacher is normal. And so I think it helps set that mindset for a young, child in Norway, yes. I can take care of kids regardless of what gender I am.
When one looks at it from a employer's perspective, this is somebody on their own time and money is actually upskilling him or herself. And so I feel as society as a whole need to talk about this, because then when it comes time for somebody to apply for a position, instead of somebody reading a resume says, oh, there is a gap instead, this is my goal one day, they look at it and say, oh, this life module that person had implies they learned flexible thinking, creativity, leadership skills, empathy, patience, and the, it is perceived as something positive, but we have still a long way to go.
The role of a manager within an organization is changing because of more remote work that previously it was much more hierarchical and it was the manager worker in the room. These are the things you have to do today and I'll come and check on you. And nowadays it is much more of a coach type relationship. And a lot of managers are struggling because this is not what they had anticipate management to be. And now you look at when you are a parent what do you do nonstop? You coach your children all the time. Somebody who was a stay at home parent coming back, they would be an ideal manager because they have the patience because they have this coaching.
If people were able to work reduced hours, let's say for the first two or three years of their child's life, maybe that would reduce the need for them to have childcare. So if they're in an area where childcare is really sparse, so it enables them to continue working and if organizations are flexible where it isn't nine to five, but maybe they have, a certain period of core hours, but the rest can be done maybe when one parent looks after the children in the morning or at night. So I feel there needs to be much more flexibility in the broadest terms.
I feel whether that is somebody coming back from parental leave, they should really think about what have I gained, what type of skills have I learned during that experience? And then the employer should be really asking when somebody returns. What have you gained? And it doesn't have to be quote unquote only during parental leave. I feel a lot of the times there might be somebody who is, let's say a soccer coach, or does some other volunteering and is learning leadership skills that could be utilized at work, but nobody knows about it. Nobody is asking.
I always believe there is no point in reinventing the wheel. If it already exists successfully elsewhere in the world, why not utilize it and maybe, tweak it a little for the local circumstances, but have a starting point already.
Bio
Karin Tischler is an Oxford University educated global citizen who has lived in the USA, the UK, Germany and now in Canada. She worked as management consultant, and department head of a Fortune 500 company.
Her experience of having children in the USA showed Karin the importance of flexible work availability across all job levels to retain and attract talent.
As a returning professional Karin focuses her speaking, research, writing, and her Emily’s Path Consulting work on future of work topics with a particular emphasis on job sharing and other forms of flexible work.
In her podcast “Job Sharing and Beyond” Karin talks to international experts about best practice for flexible work, fathers & care, support for returners and transferable skills from unpaid care work.
Links to Additional Resources
