A fifty-fifty secondment sounds balanced. The employee remains connected to the home team while contributing elsewhere, and each manager appears to receive an equal share of capacity. That description can be perfectly clear in a letter and almost meaningless in the working week. If both managers continue to plan the work of a full-time colleague, the percentage has divided a label rather than a workload. The person in the middle then carries a conflict that belongs to the organisation.
We reviewed twelve cross-team secondments in 2021. Eight had home and host managers each planning a full workload, despite an intended half-time split. Four were already aligned. That distinction was important. We did not need to announce that every secondment was broken or redesign arrangements that were working within their stated scope. We needed to resolve eight specific contradictions and understand how the organisation had allowed them to be approved. A single description of the scheme would have hidden that variation.
The problem did not require a theory about employee motivation. A person could be willing, competent and communicative and still be unable to perform two full jobs in the same allocation. Asking for better prioritisation would only help if the managers had agreed what could be delayed or reassigned. Otherwise the employee would be choosing which commitment to disappoint without the authority to change either commitment. That is not a sound test of resilience or readiness for a broader role.
The percentage did not allocate the work
I began by bringing the managers' actual work plans into one discussion. What had the home team retained? What had the host team added? Which client or internal commitments depended on the same person at the same time? The purpose was not to turn every activity into an exact time study. It was to identify the major demands that could not coexist under the stated arrangement. Operations needed to own the consequences for service, and people colleagues needed to support a workable agreement.
We rebalanced the eight conflicting schedules and kept the four already aligned arrangements. Individual agreements and the authority attached to each role remained relevant. Our colleagues worked in an insurance intermediary; an internal assignment did not turn them into an insurer's assessor or decision-maker. A change in where someone spent time was not permission to take on professional responsibilities the person did not hold. The practical allocation had to respect both capacity and the limits of the work being assigned.
The home manager could not simply delete half the employee's activity without deciding what happened to it. The host manager could not treat the secondment as additional capacity while continuing to plan as though the colleague had no other obligations. Those are different responsibilities, and they require a joint conversation. The employee's knowledge is essential, but the managers must make and own the tradeoffs. HR can help make the contradiction explicit without becoming the substitute operating manager for both teams.
Paying for a credible arrangement
Backfill and supervision cost ₹54 lakh. The expense is part of the judgement, because it shows that the company did not obtain the same total work merely by improving the wording. Some tasks needed another owner; some required different timing or supervision. The original description had made the arrangement appear less demanding on organisational resources than it actually was. Accepting the cost was more credible than expecting employees to supply unacknowledged extra capacity to make the scheme's economics look attractive.
There is a useful difference between a flexible arrangement and an unspecified one. Flexibility allows people to adjust work within a shared understanding of priorities and limits. An unspecified arrangement leaves each manager believing the employee will somehow accommodate new demands. The employee then has to negotiate repeatedly from a weaker position, often without knowing which manager's instruction should prevail. A workable secondment needs a way to reconsider competing demands when they arise, not just an agreed starting percentage.
The case reports a schedule correction. It does not prove a productivity increase, a health improvement or a universal preference for the revised work. Those outcomes would need their own evidence. Nor does it establish that every shared assignment should use a half-time split. Some roles require a different distribution, a temporary concentration of effort or a clearer separation of responsibilities. The lesson is about making the agreed arrangement credible, not about prescribing a percentage that works across all jobs.
Keeping the employee out of an impossible negotiation
Employees should be able to say when commitments conflict. But an invitation to speak up is not enough if every conflict is returned to them as a personal prioritisation task. A manager who asks for an additional piece of work should understand what else is being displaced and who can authorise that change. Otherwise speaking up simply generates two sympathetic acknowledgements followed by the same expectations. The organisation has heard the problem without taking responsibility for resolving it.
This is where the people function can contribute something more useful than a reminder about the secondment policy. We can ask both managers to state the work they believe the arrangement includes, expose the inconsistency and help them agree a revised account. We can ensure the employee understands that account and knows how changes will be considered. We should also be clear about our limits: client commitments, specialist authority and operating priorities require the responsible owners, not an HR interpretation made in isolation.
For a board, shared-assignment design may look too detailed for oversight. The broader issue is whether management's capacity claims describe real work. An enterprise can appear to have secured a new initiative's staffing while continuing to depend on the same people for unchanged responsibilities elsewhere. The resulting presentation may understate both cost and delivery risk. Directors can ask how management has accounted for retained work and what resources make the arrangement credible, without choosing individual schedules themselves.
The four aligned secondments were useful reminders that the model itself was not necessarily the problem. Some managers had already done the work of reconciling demands. The organisation needed to understand that difference rather than replace every arrangement with a uniform rule. Good oversight of a people process can preserve variation where the practical agreement works, while insisting on a clear account where it does not. Consistency of responsibility matters more than identical administrative treatment in circumstances that differ.
I now read a shared-role percentage as the beginning of a question. Which work changed when that number was agreed? Who carries the cost of what moved? Who can resolve the next conflict? If those answers are missing, the employee is likely being asked to provide the solution through extra effort or repeated negotiation. Our eight corrected schedules did not remove the complexity of cross-team work. They put responsibility for that complexity back with the managers and the company that had created the arrangement.