These people have to “see you about” and “get to know you” before they will trust you, contract with you directly or refer work to you. This means she may struggle to build and maintain trust with larger clients and other professionals. The problem is that our working mother will struggle to make a lot of these networking opportunities. They are available at “networking events”, which are often organised in at breakfast, lunch or dinner by institutions that support local businesses.
They are available outside of normal office hours. They are business owners, senior HR managers, solicitors and accountants, who are typically very busy with other matters during the 9-to-5 five-day-week routine.Īs a consequence the large – and more lucrative – corporate clients are available to meet HR consultants at certain times. With this daily routine we might assume that she has the time, skills and connections needed to deliver a complex and bespoke piece of work for a client? Well, this may be the case, but the more pertinent question is whether she would be likely to win the contract to deliver that work.Ĭonsider large corporate clients and other professionals, who might refer this HR consultant to work. Our working mom, then, drops the kids at school around 8.30 and then collects them at 5pm. Her partner is a corporate lawyer who is a slave to his work.
Worktime pro professional#
Before kids she had a prominent role in a local HR professional forum, so she also has an established network of contracts. Imagine a working mom decides to go self-employed after a successful career as a highly able HR executive. Unfortunately, HR consultants with time constrains could become trapped in alternative, typically less lucrative and prestigious approaches to developing and using social connections. We might ask, then, whether HR consultants with less time for work, developed trust and demonstrated personal credibility in the same way as their “time-rich” equivalents. The development and maintenance of trust was the foundation for contracting with larger clients.ĭeveloping trust required the HR consultants to convince their connections that they had the personal resources (such as skills, time and social connections) to deliver on contracts. This is because trust enables agreements about future work when the client is uncertain about the quality of their needs. In this context, the most useful connections were between people who trusted one another. Larger clients demanded more complex and bespoke services, and this work was described as much more lucrative. Many clients were the owners of small businesses who needed occasional and basic HR services, which HR consultants described as less well paid “bread and butter” work. The important thing to note is that these networks created opportunities to connect with new clients.Ĭlients were not all the same. They could also be with other HR professionals and other professionals who know about the clients of HR consultants. Useful networks connections could be with clients, who could recommend HR consultants to other people in their networks. Let’s start with the fact that these HR consultants needed to develop and maintain a network of useful social connections to access clients.
The research indicates that self-employed consultants who chose to work fewer hours experienced some fairly intractable forms of disadvantage. My recent research questions this common sense view by exploring the practices of self-employed human resources (HR) consultants. In short, if employment fails to deliver suitable working patters, self-employed professionals can go their own way. As a result, they can escape the long-hours culture typical of professional work and pattern their working lives to suit their personal interests. As their work is typically mobilised by technology, they can often choose when and where they work. As a consequence, careers that promise flexibility can be attractive.Īrguably, self-employed professionals can take control of their working time by spacing contracts with clients. Women are more likely to choose to work reduced hours when self-employed because they bear the burden of domestic responsibilities. Timed out? Gender, working-time patterns and disadvantage in professional self-employmentĬommon sense suggests professional self-employment is liberating, for women in particular.
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