It is clear that employing people can be very expensive for our business. It means that we should try to reduce costs while maintaining an overall flexibility. When all employees are already fully occupied at all times, the most obvious solution is to hire new employees or outsourcing specific tasks. Even so, many companies are not comfortable in having a dependence upon third party agencies. In this case, they may consider using the job sharing method. Successful job sharing methods should allow us to synchronize the overall demands of the organization. The workplace can be a highly demanding environment and by having job sharing, workers can be placed in less stressful positions.
Here are steps we should do to have proper job sharing in our business:
Establish proper Ground rules
Before we start job sharing arrangement in our company, we should have a good ground rule. It means that we should make sure that all employees are perfectly happy with the overall arrangement. We should outline at which hour each employee will do specific task. We should also specify how financial compensations and other benefits will be distributed if employees need to do more than their originally assigned tasks. Some people may be unable to maintain this level of commitment over time. We should address this possibility whenever possible. Often, we need to create comprehensive job descriptions, as well as contingency plans. We shouldn’t hesitate in revaluating various positions at the regular intervals.
Designate well-matched pairs
When initiating job sharing, we should start with the smallest teams that can be grouped into larger teams. In this case, we should choose two individuals with good relationships and closely-matched skill sets. These workers should also be able to share values, as well as comparative experience. They should be able to evenly divide workload. Their complimentary skills and good relationships should be able to gel them into a highly-dynamic work team that is comfortable in sharing success and failure alike. We should interview all applicants and this is a good way to gauge the interactions between candidates in the pair. We should be able to evaluate their strengths as a team.
Get in touch with Ex-Employees
Many companies have a policy of not re-hiring their ex-employees. In reality, the best candidates are our ex-employees, because they know how to work in our company and they have enough experiences to do many tasks in our company. It is possible that we could hire them as part-time workers. This could be applicable for retirees and moms who resigned after they got pregnant. Many ex-employees will be quite grateful of being re-hired, although they won’t get their old positions and full salary back. They already know our company inside out. They could work well with minimal re-training and costs could be minimized. We should have a list of employees who resigned due to heavy life/work balance. It is possible that now they have time to get re-employed.
