Help me figure out a new part time work schedule

August 18, 2015 7:47 PM

I am going back to work, after a year of maternity leave, as an architectural designer in November and would like to work part time, mostly from home. My boss and office is quite flexible about me deciding my own hours in the future. Trying to figure out how to maximize time spent at work while reducing stress & commute times in order to balance home & work life. I also have questions about holiday pay for part timers. (Alberta Canada). Lots more below.

My employer's office is very small and I have been there almost a decade so my boss is quite flexible about me picking my own schedule. I need help deciding on which days would work best and I will probably be asking for some or most of it to be home-based. Baby will be one and will be going to a dayhome nearby when I am working.

Are there pros and cons to choosing certain days to work part time? Those of you who work part time out of your home for an employer, do you have a schedule that works great for you? Do you find yourself going into the office more than expected or your boss calling on your days off? Is it better to group days off together or spread out the work week so you aren't piled up with work the next week? How does holiday pay work if I work part time and does it matter which days I pick? (I'm assuming I will not get paid for any holiday mondays if I never work Monday?) I am in Alberta, Canada.
I could do Monday, tues, wed OR maybe mon, wed, fri. If I can manage, I would be in the office maybe one of those afternoons or mornings to have meetings and do the rest at home.

My job is almost entirely computer-based and I will be doing architectural drafting in autocad. I'll need to upgrade my home laptop and I might have to set up some sort of file sharing network or have coworkers send me files frequently. Most of my projects are large and long term and I do most of it on my own, but I will probably have to meet with my boss or other coworkers & clients once a week or so. A lot of it can be done over phone or email.

Since having a child, my days are a lot busier (even if he is in daycare full time) and I would like to reduce my daily commute, especially in the winter. (45 mins to an hour each direction, usually.) Before maternity leave I worked 8:30-5 with an hour lunch break M-F which worked out to 37.5 hours and I was paid salary. I would like to do 20-25 hours per week if possible, and will be meeting with my boss to see if this would be acceptable and if he is ok with most of it being done from home. When I left for maternity leave we had discussed it a bit and he seemed open to my ideas.
Anything else I am not considering about switching from full time in the office to part time at home? I would appreciate your experiences with a similar work situation and how your schedule works for you.
Thanks!

posted by photoexplorer to Work & Money (6 answers total)

Best answer: I can't speak to the other parts (particularly w/r/t part-time work) with any great authority, but I have been an employer in Alberta so can answer the stat holiday question (which does hold true for part-time). You have to have been employed for 30 days (of the previous 12 months), work your regular schedule the weeks before and after -- and this part is key -- you have to have worked five of the previous nine weekdays that fall on the same weekday as the stat. So if you're never scheduled Mondays or Fridays (which most stats fall on), you won't be eligible for stat pay. You also have to be willing to work the stat if your employer requests it.

As someone who is now employed by others and works in-house for multiple companies (but with a single employer), I'd align a schedule with the key meetings and then try to incorporate a Monday or Friday to ensure stat pay. And honestly, knowing Alberta, and if you want consecutive days, you might consider taking Fridays for yourself - they're notoriously low-key and getting replies/responses that are timely are really tough. Sounds great in theory but you can end up spinning your wheels and ending up doubling your workload on other days of the week.

Sounds like you're in a great position to set up a schedule that works for you, that's fantastic, so congratulations!
posted by mireille at 8:22 PM on August 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: When my baby was little, I worked part-days every day, getting up early, leaving baby with my husband and getting to the office by 7:30. I then worked 5 hours and left at 12:30.
Since Daddy didn't have to be at work until 9:00ish, baby was at the daycare for only 3.5 hours while I got 5 hours of work. I then picked up baby and got home in time for a late lunch and a free afternoon.

That is a 25 hours week with easy commutes since I got to work early and left at lunch. I needed 30 hours to get full time benefits so I added a long afternoon on Tuesdays. You could fill in with work-from-hours as needed.

Working every day meant that I got a regular break from baby - I was happy to go to work and happy to come home. Since my schedule offset with my husbands, baby had more time with parents and less day care without being so far offset that we felt out of synch with each other. It also meant that anything that came up at work in the afternoon, people knew that I would get to it the next morning, which meant that they didn't complain about me being unavailable - I could have just been tied up in a meeting for the afternoon. (At least outsiders didn't complain - they usually didn't really realize I was part time)
posted by metahawk at 10:12 PM on August 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: The being in the office/available for working outside the house for only half a day per week can be problematic. The set up of your organisation and your standing in it may be such as to make these considerations irrelevant but then again it may not be irrelevant.

Firstly, it forces everybody else to work to your schedule making your schedule and requirements more important than everybody else's because there's always an implied expectation that we have to work round photoexplorer's availability and everybody else's diaries are more flexible. When I had to schedule meetings with a colleague who had similarly restrictive facetime it was extremely difficult to find a time that actually worked for everybody because there is so little time to play with.

Also, that colleague had to be extremely focused whenever they were in the office to get through their to dos for the day in the very limited time. They had no time for the less focused interactions with coworkers that strengthen the relationships with your colleagues.

And it becomes extremely challenging if baby explorer picks that day to be too ill to go to day care and all the carefully orchestrated meetings go to hell or take place without you.

So I can totally relate to wanting to minimise commute but be realistic about how little face time you really can get away with. Also consider how much you really reduce stress by not commuting in light of increasing other stressors. If at all possible metahawk's approach (perhaps not every day in the office but a couple of times) would ease a lot of that.
posted by koahiatamadl at 6:54 AM on August 19, 2015

Best answer: I'm American, but I work a part-time schedule from home, as do a small number of my coworkers with small children. When I was trying to pick a schedule, I talked to a few of them. I ended up deciding to work 6-hour days (8am-2pm) all 5 days a week, in part due to the structure of my work (I'm senior enough that I need to be responsive to clients and more junior staff, and it wasn't realistic to take entire days off without checking email), and in part due to my child care situation (my daycare offers 5 days-per-week schedule or 3 days-per-week but not 4 days, which would have been the most realistic alternative). One nice bonus to this has been that my part-time schedule is somewhat invisible to many of my coworkers and I think I'm getting dinged far less career-wise than I would be if I had dropped down to fewer days per week.

If you're working from home most or all days, commute isn't a factor and so it's a lot more attractive to work most or all days versus trying to do a few long days. I found it easier to spend every afternoon with my son versus getting to see him a lot some days and barely at all on other (work) days; I also think that more regular schedule was easier on him. Some of my coworkers who work only 3 or 4 days per week report that they still feel pretty rushed, because the days that they do work are similar to what it would be like if they were full-time--running out at the end of the day to pick up the kid and make dinner before everybody melts down. Despite working every day, the pace of my life feels really manageable, and when I spend time with my kid I can be really present and enjoying him versus trying to squeeze in one more chore. That's really was what I was trying to "buy" myself by going part-time.

Ultimately a lot of this may be determined by what your child care will be. It's definitely more expensive for us to have our kid in a full-time daycare and only be using it for (essentially) half- or three-quarter days, versus doing a 3-day-per-week schedule. Totally worth it to me, but my job pays well and this is one of the best things I can imagine buying with that salary. A nanny that was paid hourly would be a wash across different schedules, I suppose, although I've heard anecdotally that it can be very very tough to find a good caregiver who wants a 20-hour-per-week job with a parent who works from home.
posted by iminurmefi at 7:43 AM on August 19, 2015

Best answer: Oops, meant to add: if you do three days per week, M-W-F (or even better, M-Tu-Th because many people are out of the office Friday) is highly preferable to M-Tu-W according to coworkers who work part-time. Having more than two business days in a row out of the office is much more disruptive to coworkers if you have any interaction with them at all, and I'd be worried about the career penalty in that case. Even if you have the blessing of your supervisor and management generally to go part-time, being the coworker who won't reply to an email sent on Wednesday night until the following week runs a real risk of coworkers (or worse, clients) trying to find ways around needing to work with you, which isn't a very fun thing.

As a bit of perspective, when my kid was an infant, I felt like I didn't care at all about career sacrifices and that wasn't the main thing driving the schedule I chose. Now that he's almost 2 years old, I feel really differently--I still love my part-time schedule and I'm not hankering to climb the career ladder, but I have swung back around to being much more invested in my work than I was the first year after I gave birth. I don't think part-time parents are at any risk of being fired at my company, but I've seen them end up getting less interesting and less engaging work when the perception is that they're not very reliable or responsive, and I'm very glad that the schedule I ended up choosing also makes my part-time status totally invisible to clients and somewhat invisible to many of my coworkers.
posted by iminurmefi at 7:54 AM on August 19, 2015

Response by poster: Thanks everyone, lots of things to think about and consider! It gives me lots of ideas and I am also considering half days, especially if I am working at home anyways. I will have to ask those kinds of questions when considering daycare prices.
Cheers!
posted by photoexplorer at 7:21 PM on August 21, 2015