As employers continue to encounter major skills shortages, many qualified and willing workers remain unemployed or underemployed. If their circumstances were different, these ‘hidden workers’ would prefer to work more hours and represent a potential source of much needed labour. In this new report, Harvard Business School identifies six main categories of part-time hidden workers, each facing unique challenges and in need of different approaches by employers in the hiring process.
As employers continue to encounter major skills shortages, many qualified and willing workers remain unemployed or underemployed. These “hidden workers,” ignored by employers for a variety of reasons, represent a potential source of much-needed labor. In our initial report, Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent, we recognized the diverse nature of this group. In this follow-up, we focus on part-time hidden workers.
To examine the obstacles part-time workers must navigate in finding employment, we surveyed nearly 9,000 part-time and full-time hidden workers in Germany, the U.K., and the U.S. in 2020. In this report, we look at the sample of roughly 1,500 part-time workers who indicated that, if their circumstances were different, they would prefer to work more hours.
Part-time hidden workers are disproportionately represented by older people and women. But much like hidden workers generally, the group is heterogeneous. We identified six main categories of part-time hidden workers, each facing unique challenges and in need of different approaches by employers in the hiring process: caregivers, people facing health challenges, people with disabilities and/or mental health challenges, people with other personal or family obligations, the partly retired, and those working part time for economic reasons.
Though each of these subsets of workers faces a distinct set of hurdles, they broadly require two key forms of support from their employers: increased flexibility and robust communication.
Flexibility—in terms of both remote work and hours worked—enables workers with varied and changing external responsibilities to take on additional duties at work. Whether a worker is unable to find full-time positions in their area or must care for the health of themselves or their family, flexibility is a necessary condition for taking on more work.
Clear communication—beginning with well-defined job descriptions and extending to day-to-day interactions with colleagues—drives greater clarity and a deeper sense of engagement among workers. Understanding workers is foundational to helping part-time workers adapt to their individual challenges and to recognizing those who want to expand their responsibilities.
Governments certainly can and ought to implement policies to help part-time workers who wish to take on more hours do so, but the main onus is on businesses to make more hours available to part-time employees. That will enable employers to utilize workers they already have with company-specific experience, bolstering their income and reducing the odds that they will voluntarily leave their positions.