Part-time work is for ‘working mothers’ only. It’s what you do when you need to ‘park’ your career for a period while dealing with other priorities. Part-time employees don’t get promoted. They’re only in the office to do the bare minimum before scrambling out the door to return home while their colleagues pick up the slack.
These are just some of the assumptions we hear about part-time work. And they’re all wrong.
Indeed, there are so many assumptions made about those who pursue part-time work that one wonders why anyone whose interested in pursuing their career would risk seeking a flexible working arrangement that reduces the number of hours they physically spend in the office.
But the part-time employee base is proving a powerful contributor to the Australian economy and to the productivity and competitiveness of organisations. Part-time work is also enabling a significant portion of women to enter the workforce who may otherwise have been sidelined.
And, despite not always hearing about them, there are some excellent leaders who are excelling their careers, offering some amazing contributions, and inspiring those within their teams, all while working part-time. They’re challenging assumptions regarding just how powerful part-time workers can personally be, and role modelling the behaviour those pursuing flexible arrangements need to see in order to believe they too can accelerate their careers. They’re proving that productivity and success do not simply correlate with hours spent in the office
The problem is that we don’t see enough part-time leaders in our organisations. This could be because they are simply too busy to discuss how they’re managing a flexible career, or possibly because there’s still a stigma attached to the idea of working part-time that leads some to keep quiet about the fact they don’t work a traditional week.
It could well be because despite large employers celebrating the fact they advocate flexible working arrangements — the rhetoric does not always meet the reality, with part-time employees rarely promoted up the leadership ladder, and often left with the least challenging projects and tasks. Sure, these organisations might offer plenty of part-time positions, but taking one could see you branded with all the assumptions mentioned at the top of this article.
It’s often said that in order to believe we can take leadership positions, we need to see the kind of leader at the top that we believe we can be. When you need to work part-time, or simply prefer to work part-time, career prospects can look a little grim when those leaders you aspire to are in the office full-time, working hours that were invented during the industrial era that do not reflect the pressures and demands of our current reality.
Part-time workers are powerful. And part-time leaders are particularly powerful in that they’re challenging cultural and social norms regarding how a leader can work, and role modelling behaviour that will encourage more employees to pursue part-time careers.
The problem is that we don’t always hear about these powerful part-time leaders.
So, working with ProfessionalMums.net, we’ll soon be featuring who we believe are our country’s most powerful part-timers. We’re looking for the most senior people across the public and private sector who are working part-time, in a flexible manner or some kind of alternative way that rejects the ‘full-time’ status quo. This is not just a matter of the CEO leaving the office at 5pm to pick up the kids from soccer practice once a week (although that still should be celebrated) but also of genuinely pursuing a personalised working week that challenges the traditional Monday to Friday.
We need your help. Part-time workers don’t always receive the visibility they deserve, nor do they necessarily shout about their working arrangements. So we’re putting the call out to help find these women (and men).
Do you know a powerful part-timer? Tell us about them.
Meanwhile, got something to share on whether or not part-time work has worked for you? Let us know.