Patricia Konwinski remembers her life as ”a blur” when she was working full time.
”I worked all day, and when I came home I had to clean the house, make dinner and give the baby a bath,” said Konwinski, a senior employment representative for Steelcase, an office furniture manufacturer in Grand Rapids, Mich. ”I had no time for anything: for my son, my husband or myself. It was awful.”
Today, Konwinski is deeply involved in her career, but she also has time for her family. She has found a solution that she called ”wonderful.” She shares a job.
Konwinski`s job-sharing arrangement is an example of how mothers of young children-the number is small but growing-are finding time for their families while continuing to hold high-level jobs.
Job sharing has been suggested for years as an important alternative for working mothers. It has been called for by women`s groups, public officials, academicians and others who advocate sweeping changes in the corporate world to meet the needs of working parents.
Job sharing usually appears on lists that also include demands for flexible scheduling, part-time work, child care and parental leave.
But despite persistent talk about job sharing, it exists mainly in isolated pockets of the nation`s work force. Personnel, a magazine published by the American Management Association, reported several months ago that less than 1 percent of the work force was engaged in job sharing. Among companies, the magazine reports, from 3 percent to 10 percent have some job sharers.
Until recently, most people who shared jobs were clerical or technical workers. But now there is growing interest in job sharing for managerial and professional employees, especially women who are trying to juggle the demands of careers with the needs of young children. More and more companies are permitting it on a case-by-case basis.
”By and large, companies have been very reluctant to let management-level employees job share,” said Kathleen Christensen, professor of environmental psychology at the graduate school of the City University of New York and project director of a national survey on flexible scheduling and staffing to be published in November by the New York-based Conference Board.
”But there are enough examples to show it is possible to work out very good situations.”
Christensen added that even though job-sharing opportunities have increased for career-minded women, ”these are individual deals, for a small number of women. Firms are willing to consider job sharing for one or two pairs of valued employees they don`t want to lose.”
Businesses have been resistant to job sharing because ”It doesn`t fit in the corporate structure,” said Dr. Mortimer R. Feinberg, the chairman of BFS Psychological Associates, a human-resources consulting organization in Manhattan. ”They are uncomfortable with it. They don`t think that a job can be done by two people.”
While a vast majority of job sharers are women with young children, this flexible arrangement appeals to some other workers as well. Occasionally, men and women share jobs to have time to pursue other business interests or hobbies.
Job-sharing arrangements vary widely from company to company. They are often initiated by employees who draw up their own plans and then try to persuade their bosses that job sharing would be good for business.
Women who share jobs say the arrangement is much like a marriage, for it requires an intense level of commitment and communication between the partners. They also say they prefer job sharing over other forms of part-time work because it lets them maintain a high professional responsibility and some benefits while working fewer hours.
At Steelcase, Konwinski and her partner, Martha O`Brien, have divided one job in half. As senior employment representatives, they recruit for the marketing division. They have shared a job for more than two years and have received a promotion as a team.
”When we proposed job sharing to management, they had a whole lot of questions,” O`Brien said.
O`Brien works all day Mondays and Tuesdays, and Wednesday mornings. Konwinski works Wednesday afternoons and the next two days. Each woman receives half the job`s salary and benefits. They communicate with each other through notes in a computer, and they meet for lunch on Wednesday.
”Job sharing has brought sanity back into our lives,” said Konwinski, who has two boys, ages 1 and 4.
”I have time for myself, to do my errands, and unharried time for my son,” said O`Brien, whose child is a pre-schooler. ”We go to swimming class and ride bikes and have a lot of fun together.”
Steelcase, a pioneer in job sharing, has two other teams of women sharing management-level jobs. ”We see job sharing as an opportunity to retain employees who are highly valued and motivated,” said Peter Jeff, the senior public relations representative of the company, which has 70 other employees, including one man, who share clerical and assembly-line jobs.
While no one predicts a widespread boom in job sharing, experts theorize that it will grow because talented women will have more leverage to make flexible arrangements in a tight labor market. With the end of the Baby Boom and the decline in the birth rate since 1964, many companies already see a shortage of skilled workers. That trend is expected to increase in the coming decade.
”We are seeing an attempt by employers to increase the compatibility of work and family life,” said Dr. David E. Bloom, a professor of economics at Columbia University. ”We will see an acceleration of the rate at which employers are forced to experiment with innovative arrangements.”
”Job sharing will be tried more frequently, but it is still in its infancy and there are problems on the horizon,” said Feinberg of BFS Psychological Associates.
”In high-level jobs, who is going to take the blame, and who is going to take the bows?” he said. ”Will the job sharers be perceived as a team and promoted together, or will they be separated? What happens when one of the sharers wants to go back to work full time? These problems need to be worked out by life experiences.”
Some companies are just beginning to experiment with job sharing.
Jean Gols and Kathleen Cruise-Murphy, human resources managers, are the sole job sharers in a pilot program at the American Express Travel Related Services Co.
Gols had resigned from the company, a division of American Express, at the end of her three-month maternity leave, because she did not want to work full time. At the same time, Cruise-Murphy was looking for a part-time alternative because she was ”pretty miserable” being away from her young daughter all week.
Gols, mother of a toddler-age daughter, works Mondays and Tuesdays. Cruise-Murphy, who has a 3-year-old daughter, takes over the job the other three days. Their salaries, vacations and benefits are divided
proportionately.
”I love my job, but I did not want to leave my daughter with a full-time nanny,” Gols said.
Most women who share jobs say they view it as an interim arrangement, until their children are old enough to go to school.
Levi Strauss, in San Francisco, and Hewlett-Packard, in Palo Alto, Calif., also have job-sharing programs.
”Job sharing is not something the company encourages, but it has been very successful and is a trend we are going to see more of,” said Stephanie Decker, the internal staffing manager of Hewlett-Packard.
