Seeking a flexible friend

My (male) colleague has recently reduced his working week to four days so that he is able to spend more time with his young family. Good for him, I thought. But it did strike me that it was a good job he was not seeking the same sort of arrangement from a new employer.

It is rare that we are instructed actively to seek a lawyer to work on a part-time basis outside the public sector. My heart sinks when candidates need to restrict their working day to school hours or to particular days of the week, as only a small number of employers actively offer such an opportunity.


To achieve their goal, the employees in question often have to compromise significantly on the type or quality of work or indeed the salary that they can command.


On a handful of occasions, we have been asked to recruit for part-time positions for companies who may be experimenting with bringing legal work in-house for the first time and are not yet ready to make the commitment to a full-time role.


In private practice, requests for part-timers or offers of flexible working hours have tended to be restricted to professional support lawyers’ roles. Nor do these roles exist on a temporary/locum basis. Many candidates assume that the flexibility attached to the length of a temporary assignment also attaches to the hours. However, even though most temporary lawyers charge only for the hours they work, the expectation is that they do so on a full-time basis.


The strange thing is that there are examples of part-time staff and flexible arrangements in most offices. So why don’t the jobs seem to come up on the open market? The answer is that most roles have been created to accommodate existing female employees returning to work from maternity leave rather than by a conscious decision of the employer.


When hours are reduced, it is an exceptional case that an additional hire (‘job share’) is made to cover the ‘unworked’ part of the role. More often than not the outstanding workload is taken on by the combined efforts of the part-time worker squeezing more into shorter hours and the team around them picking up the rest. When they leave, they are likely to be replaced either by a full-timer or not at all.


Still, the only real examples of employers thinking creatively exist in the not-for-profit or public sector where flexi-time applies to all employees and pure part-time roles or job shares are more common.


The issue of barriers against part-time and flexible working across the legal services industry is about to be investigated by the Equal Opportunities Commission, although the results are unlikely to be surprising.


With pressure on employers to accommodate flexibility, the time has come for employers to approach the issue proactively and creatively, and not because they are forced into a corner through circumstance.