Ask HN: How do you scale salary for part-time work?

How does your company scale salary/benefits for part-time work?

Context:

We're a small startup in the UK trying to figure out our hiring policies. An idea we've tossed around before is that since we offer remote work with fairly flexible hours, there's a terrific opportunity to hire people who are taking a career break due to their personal life (young children etc).

Our perceived benefit is:

* we're getting access to a talent pool that might otherwise be ignored

* the offerings that are very possible as a small company (remote, flexible hours, easy access to management) are far more impactful to someone in this situation

* we have a future opportunity to let our bandwidth grow

The cost of two part-time employees isn't quite the same as one full-time, since we incur about the same fixed costs anyway (management time in 1-2-1's, payroll administration, dev setup etc). So we're wondering if cutting the salary in half is actually what we want to do?

Sounds like a good plan IMHO.

By the way, lots of kudos to you for allowing your employees to work part-time! As a dad who stays at home half-time and works half-time, I think it’s great with companies who recognise that this is a very good benefit to offer.

In any case, I run a job board and newsletter for companies and job candidates who want flexible working hours: https://30hourjobs.com

Please feel free (as in free beer!) to post jobs on the job board! And if you're interested in being featured in the newsletter as well please feel free to email me at nick@30hourjobs.com.

I've generally felt that the company has had the good end of that deal, especially for the higher fractions (0.6/0.8 of full time): productivity seems to me to be non-linear, and trading off the end-of-the-week burnout for a little more payroll admin and management sounds great. Where the fraction is much smaller, the increase in coordination costs probably means that it's more finely balanced.

The other point I'd make is that less than pro-rata will sound unfair to your part-timers, whether the intentions and justification are good or not. And defending that isn't a hill I'd die on: in skilled jobs staff goodwill is a precious commodity not to be squandered.

There may also be legal issues: I suspect that lower rates for part-timers would be unlawful indirect sex discrimination in the UK (the part-time workforce being female to a much greater extent) but that may well not be true where you are.

For a permanent hire I think it would be reasonable to ask more than half. Even working 50% hours, one does not usually completely unplug during other half - even if not active on corporate systems it's likely they're taking problems away and thinking them over.

I think you may be surprised by the output you get - when I have worked with part time technical staff in the past, it often seems to help grant a laser focus of sorts.