Work Muse

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The last first day makes me think about my sweet girl’s first first day: Kindergarten🍎—and how my job share changed EVERYTHING. I’d worked in the 24/7 radio industry. Advertising campaigns and client demands didn’t stop for anything—not holidays, even Christmas. As a new mom, running up and down hallways to pump between appointments and meetings, trying to get home for a 6 o’clock feeding, I felt like an utter failure for Iris and my clients. So when my new boss, a dad whose wife was pregnant with twins came to me with an opportunity to job share (which never ever ever ever happens, BTW) when she was 6 months old, I jumped on it (shout out to Greg Spencer!) and never looked back. Though he didn’t know it, I’d returned to radio several years before when planning for a family, believing that if I worked my tush off, I could earn a job share. I just needed full-time benefits as an equal breadwinner who carried them for my family. Greg picked up the phone to the CHRO and done! 🫰(the new company who’d bought out our old company during my parental leave had a policy!! Who knew?!!) (BTW - around 20% of U.S. companies have some job sharing, but few even know!) Shortly after, I started working 3 days a week, then handing over my work baton to my partner on Wednesdays for 4 days OFF every week. I retained my full-time benefits and we worked so productively that by the end of year one, I’d made 90% of my previous year’s income. 🤯 But even better, I could unplug to leave work at work 💯 knowing my partner was on it! So when Kindergarten started, I was able to do the previously unthinkable like: ✨ Bring her little brother to circle time to enjoy the first 20 minutes of class Thursdays and Fridays and all of the cuteness of watching show and tell and 5-year olds interacting. ✨ Leisurely go to yoga at 8:30 at a coffee shop twice a week ✨ Spend 1:1 time with my youngest who was three going to our local farm weekly to shop, parks and the zoo every Friday ✨ Volunteer to chaperone every single school field trip! It was AWESOME. I job shared nearly a decade before starting Work Muse to empower others to find the same true work-life balance—without sacrificing a career they’ve put years into. I look back on my kids lives during that decade of job sharing and know that all the intentional TIME I spent with them while maintaining my career made a difference in who they are today—but more so—to me. 💛 What would you do with the time you’d reclaim by sharing your job? ----------------------------------- 👋 I’m Melissa, founder of Work Muse. Our job share coaching, training, and programs support caregiver employees from parental leave through eldercare and help you retain & recruit diverse talent. 🔔 Follow me for more tips to live life + slay work 📖 Grab my FREE guide "The Work Muse Guide to Job Sharing" @ the link in my bio 🔄 Repost to raise awareness of job sharing #jobshare #futureofwork #worklifebalance

My WHY for job sharing (and the apple 🍎 of my eye) on the first day of daycare (I did not take her) and the first day of her senior year of high school. (On the right) Her dad took her because I worked a half hour across the city. She refused the bottle although I’d been working on it for weeks and weeks. So I found myself driving back and forth that first week just to feed my infant. When I got home that night, she was hugging a little frog stuffy, and I burst into tears. I’d never seen her hug a stuffed animal. The next months were a literal blur. I was running and gunning up and down the building to a far away office I’d been allowed to pump in, trying to keep up with 4-6 times a day to pump in between sales calls, meetings, and work. If you hear sarcasm in the word “allowed,” you’re right. I was downright miffed after my return when another manager told me I’d caused a real issue emailing to ask for a private area to pump in (versus my cubicle! 😬) before my return. Apparently, they had multiple meetings to figure out a solution. Today, much like those first months of her daycare, feels like a blur. It goes by SO fast. Senior year and then college. It will be here in a blink of an eye. But for her first 9 years, it was as if I waved a magic wand and actually slowed down time. One thing changed EVERYTHING. When my baby girl was 6 months old, I jumped on the opportunity to job share working half the week, then handing over my work baton to my partner every Wednesday for 4 days OFF every week to not miss any more moments. I retained my full-time benefits and we worked so productively that by the end of year one, I’d made 90% of my previous year’s income. 🤯 But even better, I could unplug to leave work at work 💯 knowing my partner was a total pro and had my back. I wanted TIME more than anything else with my sweet baby. I wanted to be present, joy filled, peaceful for her and with her. I didn’t want to take one minute for granted. I job shared nearly a decade with four talented job share partners before starting Work Muse to empower others to experience the true work-life balance I’d found with job sharing—without sacrificing a career they’ve put years into. So on this first day of my smart, kind, passionate daughter Iris’s senior year of high school, I have no regrets knowing I intentionally designed a professional life that valued ALL the roles I hold, including mother. She’s ready and I’m so very proud of her! 🦋 ----------------------------------- 👋 I’m Melissa, founder of Work Muse. Our job share coaching, training, and programs support caregiver employees from parental leave through eldercare and help you retain & recruit diverse talent. 🔔 Follow me for more tips to live life + slay work 📖 Grab my FREE guide "The Work Muse Guide to Job Sharing" @ the link in my bio 🔄 Repost to raise awareness of job sharing #jobshare #futureofwork #worklifebalance

Yes, men can #HypeWomen. Let’s celebrate allies in gender pay equity like (Yes!!) Flavor Flav 👏👏👏 H/T Female Quotient: In May, US polo team captain Maggie Steffens asked for financial help on Instagram. Flavor Flav – William Jonathan Drayton Jr – answered the call: “As a girl dad and supporter of all women’s sports, imma personally sponsor you, my girl, whatever you need. And imma sponsor the whole team.” Flav signed a five-year sponsorship deal to “elevate the visibility and excitement surrounding water polo in the United States.” The sponsorship includes personal appearances and financial contributions to help with equipment, facilities, and anything else they need. This is how it’s done 👏 #genderequity #payequity

Tell me your experience with job sharing—not part-time working—rather, two professionals leveraging two skill sets to super charge their careers in one full-time role. Have you job shared? Do you know someone doing it? Would you want to share your job if it meant you got high impact work with part-time hours? The peace of mind that full-time continuity when you’re not at work would bring you? Job sharers Paige Wilson & Heather Lonsdale break down HOW you work in a job share for the Work Muse Job Share Project. Their job share was a ‘pure’ job share where both partners were 💯 interchangeable, working 3 days each with 1 full day of overlap for handover. Here are a few things that may surprise you about how job sharers work differently… Job sharers: → Work an efficient, focused condensed workweek—typically 3 days a week → Don’t schedule doctors appointments or errands during their workweek → Cut out long lunches, the water cooler, and unnecessary meetings → Problem solve together and go to their bosses for help much less often than FTE → Cover one another when needed and take much less time off for sick, personal, or vacation → Lift the entire team with their enthusiasm for results. They have the time they need to rest, recharge, and return to work with brilliant ideas each week💡 On #WorkwivesWednesday, I’m sharing advice and examples of job share teams and their bosses to raise awareness for how job sharing benefits organizations. If you’d like to check out advice from more job share leaders and their employers, here’s a link to see our case studies: https://lnkd.in/gtx_ZhEv ----------------------------------- 👋 I’m Melissa, founder of Work Muse. Our job share coaching, training, and programs support caregiver employees from parental leave through eldercare and help you retain & recruit diverse talent. 🔔 Follow me for more tips to live life + slay work 📖 Grab my FREE guide "The Work Muse Guide to Job Sharing" @ the link in my bio 🔄 Repost to raise awareness of job sharing #jobshare #FutureOfWork

The Care Crisis is a career killer for mothers and daughters—and mothers who ARE daughters, like me. Add in caring for mothers with dementia or Alzheimer’s requiring 5 years or more of care and an average of 20 hours a week of care—which I can attest to, is accurate. My 69-year-old single mom came under my care unexpectedly during the height of the pandemic in 2021, her once significant retirement savings devastatingly low. I was forced out of work for 8 months while I figured out her diagnosis, finances, legal, care and housing options—with two remote learners at home. Three years later, my life, business, and family have built-in routines that work. Today, my mom lives a mile from my home in a low-income senior apartment (unable to afford assisted living which averages $7K monthly on the low end). I fought mightily for 6 months with her long-term care insurance company for her claim’s approval. Her 4 hours of part-time morning care daily costs $45,000 a year. She is lucky in many ways—a sweet community of new friends, more time with her grandchildren and daughter. It’s really the best she could hope for given her situation and illness. And for now, it’s working. At some point she will need 24/7 nursing care ($10K per month in our city)—which is beyond the scope of her policy. As a person who exercised, didn’t smoke, or drink, I believe I’ll be caring for her for the next 15 years. If you thought the cost of private childcare was a disaster for families (it is!), seeing the cost of eldercare—5X higher—should scare the crap out of you. NOBODY can afford this on their own—no matter how much or little your parents have saved. My mom’s paid caregivers are paid far less than my teenage daughter who is a lifeguard, but I must go through a care company for insurance reasons. Turnover is high, and that must be navigated by a family caregiver. If universal childcare and eldercare were a right in the U.S., nothing would stop women from rising to their full career potential. It’s why CARE is my #1 issue come November—and if you’re a woman or depend on your wife’s income for your family, it should be yours too. It’s also put a fire in my belly to help as many sandwich generation and caregiving women as possible to elevate their careers with the TIME they need for caregiving with job sharing. No other practice gives them part-time hours in high-impact work, with a supportive partner who has their back in work and life. Please share for reach to raise awareness for how much the cost of care costs individuals in the U.S. ----------------------------------- 👋 I’m Melissa, founder of Work Muse. Our job share coaching, training, and programs support caregiver employees from parental leave through eldercare and help you retain & recruit diverse talent. 🔔 Follow me for more on care 📖 Grab my FREE guide "The Work Muse Guide to Job Sharing" @ link in my bio #care #CareCantWait #Caregiverpenalty

When I was pregnant for the first time, I requested that my boss sign a contract promising my clients wouldn’t be siphoned off during my maternity leave. He laughed in a good-natured way while deflecting by saying, “Oh Melissa, you have nothing to be worried about, you’re a very good employee.” But ultimately, he went along with it. I was a media marketing and sales professional and my clients’ marketing expenditures made up 100% of my income. Even one client taken and given to a new hire or to retain a disgruntled employee could have made a significant difference to my income. It may seem cynical, but I’d seen account shifts happen many times in my industry, and maternity leave was the perfect time to do it—when the employee is absent and focused on their infant and all their demands and less likely to fight back. They might even be banking on the idea that you’re going to quit because you’ve become a parent. In fact, my boss (whom I adored BTW) would often say to me while pregnant, “You’ll just leave (when the baby gets here), they all do.” I repeatedly and emphatically emphasized that I was the breadwinner and my income was very important to my family. What’s more, that I loved my job and had zero intentions of staying home. He was a middle-aged white man with a stay at home wife and this was his belief. The problem was in the power he yielded and actions he could have taken due to it. Aside from my specific industry, the Motherhood Penalty happens to women ALL the time. It’s so pervasive that every single woman starts thinking about it from the moment she finds out she is pregnant. We have to carefully maneuver how and when to tell and how to get through it all with our jobs and income intact. That’s right, every single one of us. Thankfully, I came back, my job intact, but sadly, my boss was no longer there… There’d been a company-wide buyout and I returned to a more diverse group of managers with a gay female Market VP. My new boss had twins on the way and had worked with a high-performing job share team in Seattle. He enthusiastically supported me as I negotiated my first job share working 3 days a week with a partner I could hand over my work baton to every week in our 24/7 radio world. We split our commission 50/50 and retained FT benefits with prorated sick and vacay. By the end of year one, we’d worked so productively and efficiently, I’d made 90% of my previous year’s income. By the time I was pregnant for the second time, I no longer had to worry about the Motherhood Penalty at all. I was about to begin my second job share, and my partner Ginny had my back 💯—working hands-on with all of my clients as if they were hers because very soon, they would be ours. I could finally breathe easy. ----------------------------------- ✅ Follow Work Muse to learn more about job sharing 📖 Grab my FREE guide @ link in my bio 🔔 Follow me for tips to live life + slay work 🔄 Repost to share this tip with your network

Did you know that the U.S. had a FULLY FUNDED CHILDCARE SYSTEM, set up in mere weeks during World War II? That’s right. When women had no choice but to work in place of their husbands, the U.S. government of the 1940s stepped in to fund childcare. When an even larger global crisis hit in March of 2020, and parents were given their biggest blow yet with a paper thin social safety net… I thought, “This is it. The dam is bursting. The government’s got to do something NOW.” Too little, too late. Remember the child care subsidy paid directly to parents that then vanished into thin air?! —At a time when upwards of 3 million mothers were forced out of the workforce. A gut punch for women everywhere when for the first time EVER, we outnumbered men in the workplace in December 2019. I thought, “Now things MUST change.” Now that the Biden funding to private childcare centers ended in September, millions of children lost childcare overnight with the childcare funding cliff. CARE CANNOT WAIT. Being a parent in America is a losing proposition. Without government funding for parental leave, childcare, and eldercare—working parents (especially mothers) will continue to be royally screwed. Both women and men are in the workforce, the school day is shorter than the workday, and childcare is prohibitively expensive (if you can even find it to begin with.) It’s time for change. I’m one of a sliver of women who discovered, self-advocated, and fought handily to work in a job share arrangement to advance my career with the time (and lower childcare costs) to raise my children. I held onto it tooth and nail, through top to middle management swinging door changes and through several partners in our churn and burn media industry. It wasn’t always easy, but I fought as if my life was on the line, to keep it. In many ways it was—my family’s livelihood, my sanity, my ability to raise healthy well-adjusted human beings. I knew it was all on me. Nobody was coming. But now, we are at the tipping point. I know as a sandwich generation dual caregiver, I will be voting in November with care as my #1 issue.🗳️ How would YOU like to see the childcare crisis addressed? Let me know! 👇🏻 ----------------------------------- 👋 I’m Melissa, founder of Work Muse. Our job share coaching, training, and programs support caregiver employees from parental leave through eldercare and help you retain & recruit diverse talent. 🔔 Follow me for more tips to live life + slay work 📖 Grab my FREE guide "The Work Muse Guide to Job Sharing" @ the link in my bio 🔄 Repost to amplify care with your network #childcarecrisis #workingmoms #workingparents

If you’ve been wondering how to create a job share for true work-life balance, here are the steps: 1️⃣ Make sure job sharing is right for you - Are you a high-trust, flexible minded, high-achiever who works well in a small team environment? 🙌🙌 If so, you’re likely a great fit to share your role! 2️⃣ Find a job share partner you’re compatible with who has complementary skills to yours. 🙌🙌 Your partner should fill in your gaps and vice versa. Your team will leverage both skill sets, professionally develop one another, and be better in your job together. 🙌🙌 You don’t have to know your partner prior, they don’t need to work where you work, and they don’t need to be like you or even job sharing for the same reason you are. 3️⃣ Design your job share with the role in mind and present the business case to your employer for approval. 🙌🙌 Job sharing works in most roles and selling the benefits to your boss that your arrangement will bring your company will win buy-in crucial to your team’s success. Whether you’ve just learned of job sharing (a partnership between two professionals to share the responsibilities of one full-time position)… Or whether you’ve been dreaming of job sharing for years, it is simpler than you think to do it *if* you have a proven roadmap. 🤔🗺️ As if that weren’t amazing enough, it gets better… 🤗 When you do it, you’ll start applying job share principles to every area of your life— —including your household for frictionless equal co-parenting , while halving your unpaid labor, including the mental load. 🤯🤰 It takes up-front work to create your job share, but the backend benefits can lead to years, if not decades of a satisfyingly, joyful high-impact career with part-time hours. All with a supportive job share partner has your back in work and life. 🙌🙌 For employers, job sharing buys lifetime loyalty with continuous coverage from SuperTeams who are 30% more productive than full-time employees. 🙌🙌 What questions do you have about job sharing? I’ll answer each and every one in the comments below 👇 ----------------------------------- 👋 I’m Melissa, founder of Work Muse. Our job share coaching, training, and programs support caregiver employees from parental leave through eldercare and help you retain & recruit diverse talent. 🔔 Follow me for more tips to live life + slay work 📖 Grab my FREE guide "The Work Muse Guide to Job Sharing" @ the link in my bio 🔄 Repost to elevate and amplify job sharing with your network #jobshare #WorkMuse #FutureOfWork

When you SEE it, you can BE it! Congrats Jemma Yorke & Shelagh Collett on 7 years job sharing 👏, 7 roles 👏, and promotion together! 🙌🙌 Jemma lays out HOW sharing the role makes the dynamic duo BETTER: Celebrating 7 Years of Job-Sharing! 🎉 Yesterday marked the 7-year anniversary of job-sharing with my amazing partner, Shelagh Collett . It’s been an incredible journey balancing work, life, and everything in between. We’ve become quite the dynamic duo! Why Job-Sharing Works for Us: • Double the Brainpower: Two heads really are better than one. 👥 • Work-Life Balance: We each get to focus on personal commitments without compromising our professional goals. ⚖️ • Continuous Coverage: Our projects never miss a beat. 🎶 Job-sharing has evolved and could be key to unlocking new ways of working for future generations. Whether balancing gig work, caring or volunteering responsibilities, or even those looking to retire gradually, job-sharing offers a flexible solution. Reflecting on our journey, I can’t help but smile 😃 even if I’ve been called Shelagh multiple times by colleagues - I guess that means our handover is that smooth! We’ve navigated around 7 roles including promotions, managed to get through covid and flexed our working patterns. Our kids have gone from toddlers/nursery age to tweens and teens and I’ve definitely gained a few grey hairs but I wouldn’t want to do this with anyone else! For anyone considering job-sharing, I highly recommend it. It’s been a game-changer for us and we’d happily talk to to anyone that’s considering it! ----------------------------------- 👋 I’m Melissa, founder of Work Muse. Our job share coaching, training, and programs support caregiver employees from parental leave through eldercare and help you retain & recruit diverse talent. 🔔 Follow me Melissa Nicholson for more tips to live life + slay work 📖 Grab my FREE guide "The Work Muse Guide to Job Sharing" @ the link in my bio 🔄 Repost to amplify job sharing with your network #jobshare #FutureOfWork #HR