The means may be similar, but the end is different. gently but firmly remind their colleagues that, despite their part-time status, they’re still in the game and cannot be ignored.Īt first read, some of these strategies may sound familiar-they are, you may be thinking, the same tactics successful full-time professionals use to balance the demands of work and personal life.
cultivate champions in senior management who not only protect them from skeptics but actively advocate for their arrangements up and down the ranks.establish routines to protect their time at work and rituals to protect their time at home.broadcast the business cases for their arrangements and the nondisruptive-even positive-impact on results.make their work-life priorities, schedules, and (if possible) plans for the future transparent to the organization.Our research revealed strong commonalities in the approaches of successful part-time professionals. About 80 % of the part-timers we spoke to were female, largely because so much of part-time work is driven by child care issues, which most often affect women. Our sample included engineers, financial analysts, information technology specialists, and consultants, among others. We interviewed 30 part-time professionals in eight organizations, large and small, as well as 27 of their colleagues and managers. And, inevitably, mapmaking falls to the explorers themselves.įor the past two years, we have investigated part-time work as part of a wide-ranging research project examining issues surrounding work-life balance in the United States and Canada. Part-time professionals, then, are on their own in relatively uncharted territory. So managers have little incentive to get involved.
Second, most organizations give executives little in the way of guidelines or policies to help them manage part-time work. Most executives, stressed already with too many day-to-day challenges to list here, see the design and maintenance of part-time work arrangements as just one more hassle. Making a part-time arrangement work takes time, energy, and creativity. For even though most executives would agree, at this point, that part-time work can benefit an organization, it’s still up to the part-timers to do most of the heavy lifting. Notice that we say the part-time professionals themselves have found these solutions. Now, though, after two generations have wrestled with such arrangements, some part-time professionals have found strategies that are succeeding. In the worst case, they see their importance to their organizations slowly but surely fade away. In the best-case scenario, many part-timers end up working more hours than they intended. All too often, though, part-time work creates as many problems as it solves. They have young children, want to get MBAs, need to care for aging parents. Most professionals start working part-time to create solutions in their lives.
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