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Achieving Work-Life Balance (and Sanity!) Through Job Sharing

By: Deepa Ramesh & Chris Camillo

Deepa Ramesh is an experienced international development professional who has worked in part-time or job share positions for the past 17 years, for a variety of employers, and across time zones and international borders. She served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi (1996-98) and as an APCD in Nicaragua (2006-07). She is also a member of the WPCL Outreach & Events Committee. Find Deepa on LinkedIn here.

Christine Camillo is an international relations expert and small business owner, with two decades of success in part-time roles – including job shares – across both public and private sectors. She served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cameroon (1988-90). Find Chris on LinkedIn here.

Deepa and Chris met as colleagues in 2001 and have since grown to be close friends and collaborators. Read more on how they’ve navigated the world of job shares.

Deepa’s introduction to job shares began when her first child was born. She had done a phone interview for the perfect position in her new home in Ghana, while on maternity leave in the U.S.. She hurriedly wrapped up the call while listening to her husband trying to placate their 6-week old’s cries of hunger as he waited for her to finish. She knew at that moment that she wouldn’t be able to take the position. It was a heartbreaking realization, having to choose between child and career – a dilemma she had never really considered. However, the real surprise came when the office director reached out a couple weeks later to ask if she might be interested in a job share.

Fast forward a decade – A fascinating position on a project under bid had just been offered to Deepa. At the same time, she was navigating a challenging international move to Mumbai with her family. She was busy packing and preparing to transition her family of four to their new home all the while knowing that once they got there, she would have to hold down the home fort, learn her way around a new city, manage the kids’ schedules, and keep the household running, as her husband fulfilled sometimes inflexible professional responsibilities as a diplomat.

With all of this on her plate, she simply couldn’t commit to full-time work. Yet, her career meant a lot to her, and she wanted to continue doing the meaningful work she loved. So, she reached out to Chris, a close colleague in the D.C. area.

Chris had been searching for part-time work, after spending years in a high-stress position with a long, exhausting commute. Now with a young family, she needed a way to better balance her personal and professional lives. Like Deepa, Chris was also dedicated to her career and wanted to use the skills she had worked hard to develop. At the same time, she found herself in the dilemma of wanting to also have more free time to be present for her two children in a way that wasn’t rushed or squeezed in around the edges of her workday.

Fortunately, when Deepa proposed the idea of a job share, Chris agreed, and the project administrator was open to bringing them both on board in this way. In both cases, the hiring managers recognized the value of combined expertise and understood that offering flexibility would provide a strategic advantage in retaining top talent for complex global projects.

Let’s get into it- What is a job share and how does it work?

Although job shares can be structured in different ways, they typically involve two employees dividing the duties, hours, and salary of one full-time position. Some of the most common models are:

1) Island model – dividing the portfolio into discrete groups of responsibilities, and hiring and assigning part-time employees to fulfill them;

2) Twin model – hiring part-time employees to fulfill a single full-time role; or

3) Hybrid model (a combination of aspects of both models).[1]

The Island model, which divides responsibilities and plays into each employee’s strengths, is straightforward and relatively easy to implement, and is what Deepa experienced in the first case. The Twin and Hybrid models can be quite complex and challenging. Employers have to decide whether the job responsibilities should be split or shared in some way.

Job share schedules can take many forms, but most fall into a few common patterns. Some partners work the same daily shifts, dividing responsibilities without needing full-week coverage. Others split the week, either through set two-and-a-half-day rotations or daily half-day shifts that maximize availability. More structured variations include alternating split weeks—where partners trade three-day and two-day weeks—or alternating full weeks, which allow for deeper focus but require careful handover. Finally, flexible or ad hoc arrangements give partners the freedom to adjust their hours based on workload and personal commitments, making them especially effective when responsibilities are independent, or may vary over time (as is often the case with project work). Together, these models show how adaptable job sharing can be across different roles and collaboration styles.

Reflections- How did they make their job share a success?

We worked with our supervisors to choose a model that gave us equal responsibility, while playing to our strengths and interests. Once we won the project award and were formally hired, Deepa and Chris—together with input from our project supervisor and the Project Director—determined that a Hybrid Model would serve us best. It allowed us to share a single technical expert role equally while dividing some research and technical assistance responsibilities according to our strengths and interests. Chris took the lead on the child labor research and focused on El Salvador, while Deepa managed the work on women’s entrepreneurship with an emphasis on the Philippines. We also collaborated closely with each other and with the broader team on other global research and technical assistance activities.
We structured our schedules to maximize effective coordination while still giving us the flexibility we needed to meet project and personal commitments. To carry out our work, we set up a flexible, ad hoc scheduling model. Each of us worked under a contract that specified only a maximum number of hours per year. Outside of scheduled meetings and calls, we were free to adjust our work hours based on project needs and personal commitments. Because Chris was in Virginia and Deepa was in Mumbai, with a 10-hour time difference, we had to set up a regular schedule in order to communicate and coordinate effectively. We had standing calls every Tuesday when our work hours would overlap. For Deepa, it was at 9pm, after dinner was cleaned up and the kids were in bed. For Chris, it was mid- to late morning, after her kids were off to school. These calls were in addition to the biweekly project team calls, and we stuck to them even if we didn’t have specific agenda items. They allowed us to plan for our work, talk through challenges, and ensure alignment on work products and overall vision and strategy. And, as an added bonus, our friendship grew stronger! We also developed a continuous workflow. When we were collaborating on a specific product, each of us could work during our own daytime hours and then hand it off to the other at the end of the day. This created a seamless 16-hour work cycle that kept our deliverables moving forward efficiently. It also helped each of us work through sticking points and writer’s block much more easily than if we had been working alone.
We made a point of keeping our project team and client informed as our job share took shape. Just as it took us time to establish our working relationship, it also took the team and our clients time to understand how our job share would function. In the beginning, we fielded a lot of questions like, “Which of you is the lead on this task?” But once we explained how and why we were dividing our responsibilities, how we were going to communicate with them, how we would back each other up when one was on leave, and how we would keep everyone informed of our schedules, those questions tapered off.
We built our partnership on a foundation of trust and a long-standing working relationship. Because we already knew each other’s strengths and work styles, we entered the job share with confidence in what the other would bring. Chris trusted that Deepa would bring strong gender, quantitative, and writing skills to the table, while Deepa went into the partnership knowing Chris would apply her deep analytical and research expertise to the tasks at hand. Since we are both self-motivated and task-oriented—yet highly collaborative—we knew we could work effectively on our individual research assignments as well as in tandem on joint projects. Our shared work history and several common interests—both inside and outside the office— helped us work effectively as a team and made our collaborations more enjoyable. No doubt, our common background as Peace Corps Volunteers played a role in how we approached the collaboration! Together, these factors helped our partnership feel balanced and seamless.
We had the support of our families. As with any professional endeavor, job shares can only be truly successful with the support of those on the home front. Making the arrangement work despite the time difference required the support and cooperation of our spouses and children, particularly when we had to devote typically off-work hours to project calls or travel and also during the pandemic!

We both concluded the four-year project feeling like our partnership had allowed us to contribute professionally in meaningful ways while taking care of our families and, most importantly, maintaining our sanity! We had successfully integrated into the larger team, produced high-quality deliverables even through the pandemic, and had earned the trust, respect, and appreciation of the project leaders and the client.

Progress- A Model Worth Expanding

There’s no denying that the nature of the workforce is constantly evolving and that it has undergone significant shifts since the onset of the pandemic. While most workplaces have become more flexible in terms of where and when their employees work, job structures themselves remain rigid at 40 hours/week. Although flexibility continues to top the list of non-traditional benefits employees want, fewer than half of companies actually offer it, according to research from Stagwell.[2]

Although not all roles may be conducive to part-time work like ours were, employers would benefit from exploring more flexible work arrangements such as job shares. While job shares can appeal to a range of professionals, they tend to be particularly attractive to women, who often shoulder the heaviest burden of balancing work and family responsibilities.

We have learned many lessons along the way and are always happy for the opportunity to share them. We would love to see more employers consider this unique approach!

If you’d like to learn more on job-shares, check out these articles from Deepa:

[1] https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/job-sharing

[2] https://www.stagwellglobal.com/what-the-data-say-two-thirds-of-employees-want-flexible-work-hours-less-than-half-of-companies-offer-them/