A guest blog from my colleague Andrew Horder.
For many, the work that we really love falls into a very narrow band. So narrow that the only way to do that and nothing else is to work for a very very large business. And many of us just aren’t suited to surviving in really large companies. In fact, if the work that really lights you up is very specialised, it’s probably not even possible to make a full-time job doing just that in any company.
Traditional work’s answer to that is to give you some similar work to do as well. If you’re lucky, this “filler” work is stuff that you can at least manage to do with good heart. And more often than not, the makeweight work is stuff you really don’t enjoy at all. It might even be stuff you hate – but you have to do it, don’t you, to fill up your time.
Increasingly, companies are turning to fractional working to get specialist work done. I’d love to say they do that so that workers don’t have to do boring or undesirable (to them) filler tasks. In reality, it’s more a case of companies realising that they’re better off paying a little bit higher hourly rate for a shorter time for a real specialist in a task. They get a better result, and don’t need to pay a specialist rate for the mundane tasks that a junior could do. The result of that, of course, is to leave our specialist with only a part-time job – hardly ideal for them!
This is where you can take advantage of the situation. If any one employer only needs a part of your time (the part spent doing what you love), that means you have a part of your time available to do other stuff. If you’re lucky enough not to need a full-time salary, you can take that time and improve your work-life balance. In fact, if you <i>really</i> love the specialist work you do, your work-life balance is already fixed – it’s all enjoyable stuff. If, like most, you could really use a full-time salary, you can go and do your specialist work for somebody else, to make up your full-time hours.
And remember I said earlier that companies may well be prepared to pay an enhanced hourly rate for specialist work? It’s entirely possible that the rate you now get paid by each of your employers is higher than you were on before – so your full-time hours are paying more in total!
This article is an excerpt from TheBusyFool.com‘s upcoming new ebook “The A to Z of Loving Work”