Michelle & Sam Fletcher

We both started our careers at Deloitte, joining the Christchurch office as graduates on the same day. Everything with our careers has been fairly even since then so it just made sense that we would take a similar approach to juggling parenthood. From the outset, the aim was to share the load from parenthood as evenly as we could, to give each of our careers the best chance possible that they would also continue to progress.

Needless to say things haven't quite worked out as planned - we are now parents to four young children, including 2-year old twins, which was certainly never the plan. However, we are both still in our roles and continuing to contribute to our organisations at a senior level. We shared parental leave following each arrival and both moved to four-day weeks after becoming parents, giving us dedicated time at home with our children while remaining committed to our careers. Dealing with sickness is definitely a challenge, especially as often it's something you can't plan for. However, having the two of us in a similar situation does help as ultimately you have someone else who can step in and take that load if you're not able to on that particular day.

One of the biggest lessons we have found is that while flexibility is essential, it needs to come from all sides. We are both fortunate to have supportive employers and understanding colleagues/clients, all of whom have played a part in making this possible. At the same time however, we believe flexible working arrangements like ours work best when it is reciprocal. While we benefit from flexibility around when and where we work, our roles come with leadership responsibilities that still need to be met. Sometimes that means working in the evening, responding to something urgent outside normal hours, or catching up over a weekend. In our experience, people are much more willing to support flexible working arrangements when they can see that flexibility is being given back as well. While it is not always easy to fit in some extra work from home, we see it as part of making the arrangement successful. The flexibility we receive has enabled us to continue building our careers while being actively involved parents, and that makes the extra effort worthwhile.

The other lesson is that you have to be willing to adapt. Every stage of family life has required us to rethink what "working part-time" looks like. We found a rhythm with one child, adjusted again when our family grew, and then adapted once more when twins arrived. School schedules have created a fresh set of challenges. What worked one year often needs to change the next and as our family continues to evolve, so too the approach also needs to evolve as well. We are currently redesigning our working arrangements to better suit the demands of four young children and two school-aged kids. While the number of hours may change, what remains important to both of us is maintaining our careers alongside our family commitments.