“I wanted to keep working. I just could not keep working like that.”

Susan L. 55, Brisbane, QLD | Marketing Director turned part-time consultant

Susan had been a marketing director in the healthcare sector for eleven years when her mother was diagnosed with a progressive neurological condition. The diagnosis did not change Susan’s commitment to her work. It changed her capacity to sustain it.

The role she had been doing, five days a week in an office, with regular interstate travel and a team of twelve, was not compatible with also being her mother’s primary point of contact for medical appointments, care coordination, and the hundred small things that go with supporting a parent through serious illness.

“I did not want to stop working. Work mattered to me. My career mattered to me. What I needed was a different arrangement, not a different identity.”
— Susan

The negotiation that changed things

Susan had been with her employer for four years and had a strong relationship with her CEO. She decided to have a direct conversation rather than quietly manage the situation until it became unsustainable.

She proposed a restructured role: four days per week, with two days working from home, and a temporary pause on interstate travel. She framed the proposal around what her team needed from her and what she could continue to deliver — not around her personal circumstances.

The CEO agreed within 24 hours. The formal flexible working arrangement was in writing within a week.

“I had spent six months assuming the conversation would be difficult. It took twenty minutes. I wish I had had it earlier.”

What the arrangement made possible

The restructured role gave Susan the capacity to manage her mother’s care without either her work or her mother’s wellbeing suffering. It also gave her something unexpected: clarity about what she actually valued in her work, stripped of the volume and pace that had been filling every available hour.

Eighteen months after the flexible arrangement began, Susan made a further change: she negotiated a move to a part-time consulting arrangement with the same organisation, working three days a week on strategic marketing projects rather than managing the day-to-day of a department.

Her income reduced, but so did her overhead, the mental load of managing a large team, the travel, the constant availability. She describes the net effect as positive.

What she would tell others

Susan is direct about two things when she talks to other people in similar situations.

First: have the conversation earlier than you think you should. Most managers are more accommodating than their employees assume, particularly for senior staff with strong track records. The conversation you are dreading is often not the conversation you end up having.

Second: flexible working is not a compromise. It is a different arrangement. The assumption that reducing hours or working from home represents a diminished professional commitment is outdated and, in Susan’s experience, not shared by the managers who most value their staff.

“I am better at the work I do now than I was when I was doing twice as much of it. There is something about having limits that focuses you.”