The idea of achieving a healthy, fulfilling work / life balance has never been hotter and, along with flexible and condensed hours, job sharing is gaining real momentum across industries. We caught up with Joanne Spencer who runs her business, Infinite You Limited, as a job share with business partner Karen Jones.

Like many pairs who enjoy lasting and rewarding friendships, Joanne Spencer and Karen Jones met during their early careers and clicked immediately. Both women had taken roles at Marks & Spencer. Karen had joined the store’s management scheme straight from school and Joanne was a recent graduate. Joanne says:

“You know when you meet someone and you think ‘hmm, I just get you’? We knew we had really similar values. Values are very important to a job share because it’s not just about the work you do – it’s about how you do that work.”

The two women remained friends as they married, started families and worked in various roles. Then in 2005 a job came up at Buckinghamshire County Council that matched both women’s skills, and they decided to apply for it as a job share to fit around their home lives. Although the man who interviewed Karen and Joanne for the post later admitted he had had reservations about the job share, he was progressive enough to select them for the role as a double act. This revelation alerted Karen and Joanne to the fact that a lack of understanding into how job shares operate and why they often mean a more productive, more profitable and happier workforce, may be preventing more companies from implementing them:

“His initial concerns were soon proven unfounded and it made us think that organisations need help to gain the insight on how to get the best return on a job share, because in reality you get two brains for the price of one.”

Karen and Joanne’s joint role was as Customer First Programme Manager initially, which later progressed to Transformation Manager. At that time it was believed to be the most senior job share appointment in local government across the UK. Having honed their job sharing partnership at Buckinghamshire County Council, the two women began to make plans for Infinite You Limited. The business’s remit is to support organisations to fully utilise and develop their people’s talents, to put excellent strategic leadership in place and to manage change successfully.

When the pair set up Infinite You, the country was in the thick of a recession. As well as warnings that it was a bad time to begin an enterprise, Karen and Joanne also received well-meaning advice from people who thought a business built on a friendship was a recipe for disaster:

“They said it could destroy our friendship, it may not work and it would be too big a sacrifice, too big a pressure. We said ‘thanks very much but we think we know each other better!’”

Now, job sharing often arises as an option for Infinite You’s clients, and of course Joanne and Karen are well placed to advise clients operating in various sectors on how to make it work as well, if not better than the traditional one-job-one-person employment model:

“We think job share is a really transferrable solution and I’d struggle to identify an organisation where it wouldn’t fit in. It’s about skills. It’s about saying, ‘what skills and attributes do we bring that fit the requirements for the job?’”

The pair have ways of working to help make their own job share function smoothly. For example, every client has a ‘lead’ contact whether that is Karen or Joanne, but that relationship is never exclusive to ensure both women have some connection with every client. That’s not to say it’s all plain sailing – occasionally challenges arise. Joanne is particularly mindful of the need for the two to have time set aside to focus on the bigger picture together:

“For us the challenge comes when we don’t have quality time to put into reviewing a client relationship, or to consider new business – if we end up doing stuff on the hoof that puts pressure on the relationship. We work hard to make time to think strategically together.”
Plans are in place to make the concept of job sharing more central to the two business women’s offer. They have already set up a second company called Infinite Us Limited, which they plan to focus on next year and which will be dedicated to enabling more people to pair up and share jobs.

“When we set up Infinite You in 2007 we knew we eventually wanted to do something on job sharing and enabling people to work more flexibly. As the country began to come out of the mire of the recession we saw the new generation of employees had very different ideas of work and life and that actually job sharing could be a real option for many more people in the future.”

"We laugh sometimes because it is a bit like a marriage. You do have tough times. To have a really good job share relationship, you have to get beyond that preciousness of ‘me, me, me’. You’ve got to think ‘we, we, we.’”