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Advice for going part-time at work?

kafunderkafunder member
in D.C. Area Babies

Anyone have any advice for proposing to my manager that I go part time at work. I'd like to propose having Fridays off for half the year (summer months) because we can't afford for me to do it the whole year (the other option is to take every other Friday off, but I think in the winter I may not need it as much for a variety of reasons).

So, any advice or words of wisdom? I'm hoping to talk to my manager next week. Our company has several part-time employees at my level and many that work from home, so this isn't new territory for them, but I'm still so nervous about asking.

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Re: Advice for going part-time at work?

  • vtkgirl77vtkgirl77

    I did this 2 years ago and I love working a 4 day workweek. It is wonderful so I definitely say go for it. 

    I would basically anticipate any of your manager's concerns and make sure you can explain how you will mitigate those. For example, with my job, we have report deadlines and I told my manager that I will manage my workload so that I still meet all of my deadlines. If there's a deadline on a Friday or Monday, that makes it tight for me but I just make sure to plan my work so that everything is completed on time.

    The other thing I did was I asked my manager if we could do a 3 month trial and re-convene in 3 months to discuss how it's working. I think that was nice for her because she wasn't committing to it "forever". She was just committing for a 3 month period. However, after the initial 3 months, she gave me the greenlight to do it indefinitely.

    The only thing I would be careful about is offering to be available on Fridays because that can be a slippery slope. In the past 2 years, I've come in on 2 Fridays for important meetings and I've rarely ever done any work on Fridays. They know that I don't answer emails, I don't do any work, and I'm not available on Fridays. I figure that I'm not getting paid so I'm not going to set up that expectation. So, I would just be clear with your boundaries from the get-go.

    Good luck and I hope it works out.

     

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