Performative part-time?
I’ve noticed a small but significant trend this year. More leaders are interested in powerful part-time work whether that’s for individuals, pairing people for job sharing experiments, or exploring how to trial a shorter work week across the entire organisation.
This sounds great, doesn’t it? But part-time power isn’t something we can guarantee just by wishing it were so.
Take a senior part-time leader I’ve been working with recently. She’s concerned that part-time work might be undermined if others want to try it, based on her experience. Her non-working day is punctuated with email exchanges, phone calls and a bit of quiet ‘catching up’ work from home. This is the classic ‘performative’ day off familiar to many, many part-time people out there.
Giving her a label to describe her concerns was a relief and somewhat helpful, but it doesn’t change anything if that’s the end of the conversation. How can she do more than label the ‘performative’ part-time risk, but instead avoid it altogether, for herself and others and instead drive towards powerful part-time?
Like anything, part-time work can go wrong. When it goes right, it is incredibly powerful, but getting it right isn’t inevitable. Looking at this model, we can see three categories of part-time work going wrong, with only one part of the territory being the win-win so many of us are looking for.
Let’s take a look at how part-time can go wrong, starting with the worst case scenario.
Problematic part-time
I’m sad to say that I see this more often than you might expect. When a role has been filled with a part-time person but the role itself was cobbled together, in a budget constrained context, ultimately becoming even larger than a full-time role. It’s the worst of all worlds. There is poor job design to begin with, compounded by no work to right-size the role for a part-time incumbent. Then the individual has no clear boundaries in place, or if they try to assert some reasonable ones, they aren’t respected by colleagues or leaders. This scenario results in low trust with a high risk of burnout. It usually concludes with the employee resigning feeling undervalued and exhausted.
Privilege part-time
I’m pleased to say that this is ‘privilege’ scenario is quite rare, although not vanishingly so, in my experience of part-time work observations. If performance expectations are reasonable, but they have been unclear to the incumbent, they are likely to be sticking nicely to their part-time arrangements but not delivering their side of the bargain, at least in the eyes of some colleagues or leaders. As they continue to maintain their boundaries and deliver what they think they’re meant to within the time available, they can become resented by others. I saw this at an extreme level with one team I was coaching after tempers had boiled over. It is really difficult to reset and rebuild, although not impossible.
Performative part-time
Dr Ellen Joan Ford in her post-doctoral research found that ‘performative’ part-time work was common. People work more than their agreed (and paid) hours in order to get the job done, which hasn’t been designed for a part-time incumbent. Colleagues and leaders are often unaware of the toll this takes, as they only see reliability and excellent work performance. Over time, it can lead to burnout risk and resentment, especially if the part-time person has full-time colleagues taking home the full pay for the job, which they have been doing, but partly in their own time.
Powerful part-time
We’ve established that there are several ways that part-time can go horribly wrong, so how can we avoid these scenarios?
You’ll be pleased to know that Dr Ellen’s research also found that part-time people are powerful. They are typically more productive, as they’re often able to get the same work done as full-time colleagues within their part-time hours. If this is the kind of power we want to achieve, by design, every time, what do we need to do?
It takes a combination of:
Job design and right sizing - see Belinda Morgan’s work on ‘Solving the part-time puzzle’
Setting reasonable and clear performance expectations - many organisations have a performance management approach that is good enough, it’s often just badly followed. Doing the basics of planning the work with the team, agreeing who will do what by when, then repeat every three months, is what I’d consider the minimum to keep you safe here.
Understanding and upholding boundary preferences - I have a very easy to follow boundary exercise, as part of my Flexperts toolkit, that teams use regularly with great results. Give it a try and repeat every six months so your insights remain relevant.
If you want to drive more creative ways of working in your team and join the growing trend I’m observing, now you can. Avoid ‘performative’ and instead get ‘powerful’ part-time, every time. It takes just three components and you’ll drive productivity, performance and wellbeing for a healthier workplace.