Reaching a senior level in their career while also being able to devote substantial time to their young children is an achievement that Sarah C. Bailey and Melinda Chaponnel made happen.
Setting up a job-share arrangement at NAB in January 2012, Bailey and Chaponnel have been able to pursue their career goals while maintaining a realistic work/life balance — all thanks to asking for what they want and putting themselves out there.
“The one piece of advice that I have received in my career is asking for what you want and going after what you know you can do,” says Bailey, who is now sharing the role of head of logistics operations at NAB with Chaponnel after they both moved from the bank’s finance operations area a month ago.
“We really worked through what it is that we wanted to do – individually from a career perspective but then jointly – and we articulated what we wanted to do to those who would be able to provide that opportunity to us. That point of asking for what you want is really important because if people don’t know, they’re not going to be able to help you out.”
Bailey and Chaponnel have both been with NAB for some time (Bailey started seven years ago after a stint with KPMG in Scotland, while Chaponnel joined the bank in 2000) and in those years they have managed to carve out a varied and challenging career path for themselves, with the latest change from finance to operations keeping them enthused and energised. But the overall key to their success and happiness, according to Bailey and Chaponnel, has been the opportunity to develop a strong working relationship and share their role in a job-share arrangement.
“Job-sharing is a mechanism that allows me to do what I want to do in my career. I never really thought about job sharing as part of my career but I always wanted to have a meaningful role that I was being challenged in and where I felt like I was really contributing to the organisation – as well as having that balance in my life, particularly having children,” Bailey says.
“Job sharing allows me to hold a senior role with Mel but also have time at home with my children, which is a really important part of my life at the moment because they’re quite young.”
It was Bailey and Chaponnel’s manager at the time who suggested they set up a job-sharing arrangement after they had both applied for the same role. However, while NAB had flexible work policies in place, they both had to put forward their own business case in support of their job-share arrangement.
“Our manager suggested it but then we had to spend a bit of time together working out how to make it work. We then had to present a business case to the general manager of the area just to talk through how we’d make it work and how it would work for him and various other stakeholders. We had a lot of conversations and I think that’s held us in really good stead,” Bailey explains.
For Chaponnel, making their job-share arrangement work effectively and efficiently took a lot of thought and planning but also a meeting of the minds in terms of their career goals.
“At the end of the day you’re taking a bit of a leap of faith, which we did, and you just have to go with your gut as to whether you think it’s worth the chance,” she says. “We’re in very similar situations as to what we want to achieve in terms of having a challenging work environment, but also retaining that balance so we’ve got time at home.”
While Chaponnel and Bailey instantly grabbed hold of the job-sharing opportunity and have witnessed the benefits firsthand, they’re keen to encourage the spread of job-sharing as a work option for both men and women across all organisations. And although there are more and more examples of successful job-share arrangements emerging, they both want to see more organisations embracing the concept.
“At the outset of our careers there were no a lot of examples of flexible working and there wasn’t a lot of work/life balance,” says Chaponnel. “We’re seeing more examples of both females and males working differently. It’s really evolved over time.”
According to Bailey, the benefits of job-sharing for organisations are vast, claiming her and Chaponnel’s work outcomes are even better than they would be in their own right.
“There is a really great benefit and opportunity for organisations in job-sharing,” she says. “We would love to see other combinations and different ways of working – not just for women. I think there’s something in that and I think as we see more and more job-sharing we’ll all be able to articulate what that benefit actually is.”