Job sharing or rather dual leadership?
(Photo: tandemploy)
Dusseldorf The story of Anna Kaiser and Jana Tepe is above all one in which two people were in the right place at the right time. When the two were still working in a personnel consultancy in 2013, they received an application asking if they could share the position with a second person. A quick Google search showed that the search term “job sharing” in Germany delivered hardly any results – the idea for the start-up “Tandemploy” was born.
Almost nine years later, many companies want to offer flexible working models – also due to corona. Anna Kaiser and Jana Tepe are benefiting from this development: “Every HR department somehow has this on their agenda today,” the two founders explain in the Handelsblatt podcast “Rethink Work”.
Your company now has 30 employees and, in addition to job sharing, its software also offers internal company networking for joint projects or lunch. You yourself describe the concept as an “in-house talent marketplace”.
One of Tandemploy’s most prominent customers is Lufthansa – a company that was hit particularly hard by the corona crisis. Hardly any machines took off for months, the joint project had only just started.
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However, the shock and uncertainty of the two founders at the beginning of the pandemic quickly gave way to optimism: “We quickly realized that companies have an even greater need for our solutions,” says Kaiser.
In particular, companies with hiring freezes suddenly had a particularly high interest in finding internal talent. Ultimately, Lufthansa also continued to work with Tandemploy – and used the software, among other things, to staff the in-house vaccination line.
Privately, Kaiser and Tepe also share their jobs as CEOs of “Tandemploy” – although that doesn’t mean that they work part-time: “At some point we also have the concept of full-time versus part-time‘ questioned. And we found the answer to this question, that we split a classic 80-hour week as a managing director into two 40-hour weeks, each with less stress.” tell the two in the podcast.
More: You can hear the previous episode of Handelsblatt Rethink Work here.