Mother in Law: Working part-time? Don’t sell yourself short

I saw some comments online about the future of working part-time, bearing in mind the flexibility offered by a lot of firms these days. I still work part-time, and these are, in no particular order, my thoughts based on the reality of the imperfect world we find ourselves in. 

I spend most of my waking hours feeling guilty about most things but, by working part-time throughout this period in our lives, I haven’t felt particularly guilty about the trade-off between time and effort at work, and time and effort with my children. I would take the pay reduction every time over more guilt. 

I appreciate, of course, that many people simply have to work full-time to pay the bills. I’m not suggesting they should feel guilty. I don’t remember my mum ever feeling guilty about working full-time because the bills simply needed to be paid, and that is quite right. 

It is possible that I don’t feel guilty because I put in an extra 10-30% time and effort with each of my job and my children, each day. I’ve seen people work full-time and fall down on both jobs; I aim, by working part-time, to smash both jobs. It’s hard. The trade-off is, I guess, that I fall asleep on the sofa most evenings by 8.30pm and my husband watches all the good telly without me. This will continue to be the case until he joins the PTA and takes something off my plate.

The first comment I saw online was that, essentially, if you have to start late or finish early, but you meet all your targets and fulfil all your commitments, you should just be treated as a full-timer and get paid accordingly. This is, I suppose, called ‘flexitime’ at some firms, and at others it is just the unwritten norm, particularly for more senior staff. It is very grown-up and I’m all for it. I do think it works better with more senior staff though. The people we are employing are getting younger and, rightly or wrongly, their attitude to work-life balance is different. I keep getting asked questions like ‘because I came in 15 minutes early, can I leave 15 minutes early?’ When I was a trainee, I would have preferred to poke myself in the eye with my bodger than ask my boss that question. 

Fee-earners (at the firms I have worked at, at least) get paid a price for the job. It is quite a good price, compared to other jobs. That means that if you have to work additional hours to get the job done, you do, and you don’t get paid overtime for it. This is what I am talking about above, when I talk about putting extra in. My pride in the quality and timeliness of my work means I do a bit extra, almost every day, at a time that suits me – usually when my brain is at its freshest. I see this as a business-like approach (I like everyone to see the success of the business as something they contribute to, as if they were working for themselves) and it has done my career no harm at all.

That becomes tricky if your hours equate to short days. There is no point getting paid until 4pm and working until 5.30pm every day. If you are doing that, stop right now. You are just getting paid less than the person next to you for no reason. 

But more importantly, people usually work short days because they have to be somewhere else, looking after someone, outside of those hours. I had no appreciation of this until I had children but at that point failing on this front became my biggest fear. Yes, someone will put your young child on a chair in a corridor if you are late picking them up from school. They won’t have to roam the streets with the drug dealers. But you have to have a pretty resilient child for them not to be upset by this happening more than once. I now also hear stories of nurseries charging up to £5 per child per minute if you are late. I would have really struggled if all my working days had had hard starts and stops.

If you are consistently working way above your contractual hours because your workload is too big, that is not OK and you need to address that. That’s different to getting in early out of choice. 

There must be firms out there who just give you a fee target and don’t care what hours you do. That’s how I would run a firm. We probably need to move away from charging for our time for firms to become less focused on presentee-ism, which I can actually see happening as AI becomes a bigger part of our lives.

I guess the answer is to work in a way that works for you, your family and your clients and not sell yourself short on pay. And I know this is annoying to hear, but as a parent of children who now both have front door keys, Apple Pay and securely screwed-on heads to deal with emergencies, things do get easier.