Job-sharing has taken off across the civil service, and is being hailed as the key to diversity at senior levels. But how did we get here? And are the 'personal overheads' worth it?
The winds of change were notably absent from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the early 2000s, according to Sir Martin Donnelly, who was the department’s gender diversity champion – alongside his role as director general – from 2004. He remembers an era of very male, very traditional working practices, which were increasingly out of step with the rest of society. “I got women together and was powerfully struck by the depth of anger about expectations around being a man and not having other responsibilities,” he says.
And yet, by common consensus, the FCO blazed a trail for job-sharing and flexible working. Looking back, Donnelly wonders if this was borne out of the difficulty of transforming that stubbornly old-fashioned environment – whether it forced an innovative approach. “It was clear to me that we were going to have to offer a range of career options,” he says. “And the general response to that was ‘we’ve never done it before and all these jobs are very busy’. So it took a bit of challenge to say, ‘we are going to do this’.”
Dame Menna Rawlings, who is now British ambassador to France, was HR director at the FCO from 2011 to 2014. There had been a welcome rise in the number of women working in the civil service, Rawlings says, but there was a distinct lack of career progression for those women, many of whom worked part-time due to childcare commitments. She believes the frustration of that cohort of women forced the pace of change: “I know a lot of colleagues found part-time working difficult, as often it felt as if a full-time job was simply being squeezed into half the time.” A small number of job-shares started emerging as a preferred model, and those arrangements – while few and far between – were successful.
Rawlings realised that a policy change was needed if the job-sharing model was going to take off. “A key shift was moving the burden of proof on job-shares from the employee to the manager,” she explains. Prior to this, staff had been expected to make a case to their boss if they wanted a role to be anything other than full-time. The new approach flipped this on its head. “The manager had to justify why the job could not be done as a job-share or another type of flexible working.”
“You might worry that your line manager would judge you if you went to them and said, ‘I’m really struggling.’ But your job-share partner would never do that” Ruth Hannant
The results of this adjustment surprised everyone involved. Job-sharing was popular, and it was working. “The headaches and concerns people had about it turned out not to be actually true,” recalls Professor Alexander Evans, a former diplomat who was on the HR Board of the FCO as Rawlings’ policy shift came into play. “People with very varying styles of working turned out to be a plus not a minus. There might be the odd one where you have to say, ‘this isn’t working’, but the bulk of them worked, even at SCS level.” Applications came in from policy professionals who wanted to job-share overseas ambassadorship roles – a job which had long been off-putting to women, whose partners were reluctant to abandon their own careers. Ambitious women started to see the FCO as offering an attractive but manageable career path.
Within a few years, the evidence base for job-sharing and flexible working patterns in the FCO was firmly established, Evans says. “The organisation had flipped from having a very small number of flexible posts to the vast majority of staff working flexibly in one form or another. And this had a particular effect on retention rates for female civil servants, who might otherwise have left.”
Martin Donnelly remembers taking this new approach with him to his perm sec position at BIS in 2010, which involved a significant mind-shift for existing staff. “We got away from people thinking that working long hours was necessary. It had been part of the wider unspoken culture, and we changed that,” he says. “We made it clear that this was the new normal, it wasn’t an exception, we wanted part-time working and job-shares and a recognition that high performance requires teamwork.” By 2015 this had paid off: “We ended up with a 50:50 split between men and women among senior managers at all levels – across the exec level, the DGs, the directors and the deputy directors – which had not happened in any department that I was aware of before.”
Donnelly’s drive for change was a little too late for Ruth Hannant, who went part-time at BIS when her daughter was born in 2006. “My non-working time was very interrupted,” she says of her part-time years prior to job-sharing. “I thought more roles would be open to me as a job-share and I could properly focus on my children on my days off. So when an opportunity came up at the Treasury I moved across.”
Hannant remembers a bit of scepticism about job-sharing back then, around “whether people could make it work, whether the overhead was too much for the organisation”. And there were teething problems, mostly around technology. “It was hard to access shared email or calendars on your phone, so one of us would have the work phone for six months and the other would get every single email forwarded to a personal email account.”
Despite these early challenges, Hannant’s job-share with Polly Payne is a renowned success story: they have job-shared together in five different roles in five different departments, with two joint promotions. They were the first job-sharers to break the DG ceiling, and are currently directors general for policy at DCMS. “We were acting perm secs at DCMS for five or six months,” Hannant says. “That’s still a ceiling that needs to be broken through.”
This success story appears to repeat itself across the civil service, with job-shares springing up across the SCS and in innovative, unexpected places. Men are job-sharing too, sometimes because of child-caring commitments but sometimes because they want to do more with their life than work. In the 2023 Civil Service People Survey, 1146 respondents described themselves as job-sharers across the civil service, up from 798 in 2014. The true number is likely to be higher, since some job-sharers may have declared as part-time.
“Maybe one of them is doing better than the other and we can pick that up in the appraisal without harming the job-share. It’s not an omelette, we have two separate eggs here” Martin Donnelly
Working arrangements are becoming increasingly experimental, says Rawlings: “I’ve seen some of our heads of mission overseas job-shares work through a ‘three months on, three months off’ approach, rather than divvying up the working week. My diplomatic colleagues are often fascinated and curious about how we do it. We are seen as cutting-edge on this in the world of diplomacy, which also helps Brand Britain.”
Are there really no drawbacks to job-sharing?
A small number of civil servants who did not want to be named told CSW that being managed by job-sharers is not always easy. Some spoke of handover day – when both job-sharing partners are in the office – as being lost to the process of handing over, eating into the working week. And some spoke of different personalities and different levels of competency, meaning the manager “who would know what to do” might not always be available when needed.
Katherine Green, a director general in DWP who has job-shared with Sophie Dean since 2018, says there are ways around these potential pitfalls. “We’re different leaders and we have different styles and personalities and we are really open with our staff about that,” she says. “We try and even up the time so it’s not always the same person speaking to the same member of the leadership team, and we ask everyone to give us feedback. People in the main are really good at doing that.”
Regarding handover day, Green explains that she and Dean do all of that outside of office hours. “We have a Sunday night phone call. We use it as a way of assimilating our own thoughts, and of making key decisions together.” She describes this Sunday night call as “pretty critical”, adding that there is sometimes another handover phone call during the week, as well as written notes for one another. “You shouldn’t go in with your eyes shut on that,” she says, referring to it as “our own personal overhead”.
Surely that’s a big ask? Isn’t that as bad as a traditional part-time role, trying to fit five days’ work into three? Green is clear that for her, job-sharing is infinitely preferable. “You have complete confidence that while you’re not there, things are getting pushed forward and there’s not going to be a big build-up for when you get back,” she says. “I think there are benefits to the organisation of resilience and two brains, but the hidden benefit on a personal level is support – both in the formality of decision-making and a second ear – but also really strong friendship. I know Sophie would say the same.”
DCMS’s Hannant also describes a lot of time spent handing over outside of office hours, at the weekend and again on a Thursday morning. “We have a handover document that we keep updated all the time. We want people to assume that if you have told one of us something you have told both of us, and we will make it happen.” And she concurs that despite this infringement on her personal time, it is hugely preferable to part-time working outside of a job-share.
Senior roles can be lonely, Hannant says, and job-sharing mitigates that. “You learn from each other,” she adds. “When you see someone else tackle a set of issues in a different way to you, it helps you develop professionally. You might worry that your line manager would judge you if you went to them and said, ‘I’m really struggling.’ But your job-share partner would never do that.”
Evidently there is a trick to making a job-share work, and the successful ones are underpinned by a level of mutual support that justifies the “personal overhead”. But how much of it comes down to the alchemy of two people who hit it off? Can any pairing be successful, or are some doomed to fail?
“You can build a chemistry and rapport,” Hannant says, “as long as you are both committed to making it work. Polly and I are both quite control-freaky – I did wonder at the outset, will I be able to cede that control to another person? It turned out I could, but that might be because we both knew the other person was going to be on it.”
Green echoes this point. “Sophie and I have always had a personal chemistry, but I’ve seen job-shares where that isn’t the case, and they work. It makes it fun and enjoyable, but it’s not essential.”
Any issues around weaker partners within a job-share can be managed, according to Martin Donnelly. “We worked very hard on this at BIS. You don’t treat them as a job-share for appraisal purposes, you treat them as individuals with different developmental needs. Maybe one of them is doing better than the other and we can pick that up in the appraisal without harming the job-share. It’s not an omelette, we have two separate eggs here.”
Even the cost issue is manageable, according to Evans. “There is a slight pay bill implication, because two people are working an overlapping day. But frankly that comes out in the wash when you’re in an organisational unit of above 12 or 13 people; that’s not dissimilar to variants in pay scales.”
Despite the clear success of the job-sharing phenomenon, one senior source makes the cautionary point that “this issue of having a culture of inclusion – the civil service is still rolling the boulder up the hill. If you stop pushing it’s likely to roll back again.”
“I do wonder if we could be more deliberate about our recruitment practices so they are more job-share friendly,” Hannant says, referring to the need for a relentless focus on diversity. “The rules for external candidates aren’t easy, you need to know who you are going to job-share with when you apply. And there is no common approach in terms of how we interview job-share applicants. We need to make that less ad-hoc.”
Green notes that the job-share matching website set up by civil service HR has closed, meaning that people seeking a job-share tend to find them through their own networks. “I’ve helped loads of job-shares find each other,” she says. “Any decent manager, if they’ve got part-time people, will be thinking about it … it’s in our consciousness now in a way that it wasn’t before.”
Reflecting on progress since those early days in the FCO, Rawlings points out that the continued buy-in of ministers and other leaders is crucial. “You need ministers to accept that it won’t always be the same face at the table, and to encourage and support diverse approaches to what ‘good’ can look like,” she says. “We’ve come a long way, but we’ve got further to go. I look forward to seeing job-sharers as permanent secretaries in the future, and I think there are still too few senior leadership roles that role model diverse working patterns.”
Being a role model for change is a true privilege, says Hannant, thinking back over her career and the change she’s seen since her job-sharing venture began. “People have told us how empowering seeing me and Polly was for them. If they wanted to try a job-share, they were able to say, ‘if they can do it, why can’t I?’”