Hi I’m Cliff Ennico, legal editor of SBTV.com and author of the best selling book Small Business Survivor Guide.
So you’ve got a small business with a few employees and one of these employees, a very valued employee and your trusted employee is making some noises that he or she might want some flex times so they can focus on some family issues, maybe there’s a new baby in the house, maybe here she is just recently got married and they are moving into a new home. Maybe there's an elderly relatives who needs to be taking care of, you want to be responsive to this obviously as a small employee. You want to create an environment with people that comfortable working for you, you want to give your employee flex time and as much as flexibility in their work family life as they can possibly handle. But at the same time you also want to make sure that the job gets done, and you can not afford to hire a new person to work for you while this other person takes time off.
One solution that might occur to you is something called Job Sharing, that’s where this employee and another one of your employees share the job and the responsibility in title and functions for our limited period of time until the key employee is able to resume their full time responsibilities. This is a very popular arrangement, a lot of small employers especially like doing this because it’s a way to give their employees some new experience and new training and give them the work family balance if they want with out accruing the new additional cause. But there is some risk in my abilities to associate with this that you needs to be aware of.
First of all job sharing is a partnership, when you create a job sharing situations you now have a partnership of two people performing that job. Not just one person, and partnerships as we all know only work as well as the partners ability to communicate, as long as this two people are on the same page, as long as they work well together in the past and they’re schedule are such taking accommodate each other with out putting to much reverting on the other person. Chances are the job sharing arrangement why it where. What if the situation determinates it, if the two partners are not communicating as well as they should. If one partner is hugging all of the good times that are available to work in and leaving the other partner with all the evenings and the week ends and the grave yard shifts, that other employee is going to become pretty dist actual after awhile and you will hear about it.
I always hear my client’s say that job sharing arrangements are great for the employee but there are had ache for the employer because they double you supervisor responsibilities. You may find your self having to repeat things to the one partner because the other partner didn’t tell them what they had done during the day. There maybe other communication issues to that you have to address, and the personality complex that you may have to be involve in this mediator, if that tends to double the amount of supervisor time your going to have with that position, and keep in mind people sometimes do make mistakes. Here are some tips, if your planning to set up a job sharing relationship.
Number one, set the two people down and let them know exactly what your expectations are, the job after all comes first and you need to let them know that how ever they work things out the job must get done, your goals and expectations must be met. That’s number one and make sure that you communicate to both people at the same time, via email or what ever so that both people are getting information at the same time from you.
Second, make sure you let the employees now that the arrangement is only going to be temporary. Let’s assume as the situation has evaporated that creative bliss that a need for a job sharing relationship, you do intent to put the valued employee back in the full time position. This will help manage expectations and will lead the other person not to think that they are the air apparent for that other person shot with that other person decides to quit. Which is another risk of job sharing relationships?
Finally, and this may sound a little bit cool but I think it’s something you have to do with job sharing arrangements. Make sure this two people know that if either one of them make a serious enough mistake during the job sharing relationship. Both or their jobs maybe a jeopardy, as an any partnership, each partner is liable to the other ones actual missions and that’s no difference in the job sharing situations in any other partnership, let them know that if one person makes a mistake, the other person is not necessarily going to be left of the hook. That will encourage those two employees to communicate frequently in often because neither one of them is going to loose their job because of the mistake that the other person made.
I’m Cliff Ennico for SBTV.com.
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