Appendix B

Scheduling Options for Job Sharers

Ideally, the supervisor and the job sharing team should jointly determine how the work-week will be divided. While the needs of the office are paramount, a successful arrangement will take into consideration the needs of the employees as well. Several options are possible, including split days, alternate days or weeks, and flexible or compressed work schedules if the agency permits it.

For example:

• One employee could work Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday; the other, Thursday and Friday. The next week the team could reverse so that each would work a total of 5 days per pay period. (Note that the number of hours worked by each team member may be the same or different, and the combined hours may total 40 hours or more or less.)
• Each sharer could work consecutive weeks beginning on a Wednesday.
• One member of the team could work Monday, Tuesday; the other, Thursday and Friday. On Wednesday, both employees could work a full or half day, depending on the need for overlapping time. (A certain amount of overlap time may be necessary.)

When job sharers want to work on alternate weeks, certain scheduling requirements must be met. In order for a part-time employee to be regularly scheduled -- and eligible to earn leave-- he or she must have one hour of work scheduled in each week of the bi-weekly pay period. Also, a part-time employee may not be scheduled for more than 32 hours per week. Within these requirements, one job sharer could be scheduled for 32 hours in week A and in week B. The employees would have to take annual leave (or granted leave without pay) for the one hour in the week he or she wanted to be off. Job sharing on a 6-months on, 6-months off basis should be handled differently. In this situation, the employees would be considered full-time and could be granted leave without pay at the agency's discretion.

The example might give the impression that job sharers' time on the job must be mutually exclusive. While this may be true in most cases, employees can overlap some or all of the time, depending on the nature of the work and the availability of space and equipment.

Job sharing offers supervisors considerable flexibility in scheduling. Temporary rearrangement of hours does not require paperwork, but consideration needs to be given to employee concerns such as child care or class schedules. Job sharing also allows the supervisor to match the work schedules to workload peaks. For example, one job sharer could work an early morning tour and the other, a tour late in the day, with no coverage in the middle of the day. Further, since job sharers can often swap schedules to cover for each other's absences, the office has the benefit of a built-in backup system. (Advance arrangements should make clear the conditions under which one team member would be expected to work additional hours in the absence of the other and how work will be performed if one of the job sharers were to leave the position.)