Imagine that a temporary absence from your workplace could lead to 10 years of sustained high performance being forgotten. Imagine that your relationship with senior partners at your firm, with whom you had previously worked closely, significantly worsened. This was Diane’s (not her real name) experience following her early return to work from parental leave. “Before I went,” she told us, “I was promised, ‘You will get all your clients back,’ so that was part of the reason I came back. I thought the sooner I came back and got my clients back, the better. But when I came back, that didn’t happen — I didn’t get any of them back.” On her return, she found that not only did she fail to get her clients back, but the colleague who took them over didn’t even know that she had previously managed them.

Diane’s experience represents the experience of so many talented women in our research on the return to work after parental leave. Our research suggests that many firms are failing to support female talent making this return and that women are often left feeling frustrated and disappointed by it.

For many women, returning to work after parental leave is a key career transition point. Before returning from leave, many women feel mixed emotions: concern about leaving their child with another caregiver, but eagerness to return to an adult, professional world where they have mastered the subject matter. But even so, returning to work after leave is harder than many women anticipate.

To find out more about what matters to top female talent in this situation, and what makes some transitions tougher than others, we conducted a multi-phase study. (We recently presented initial findings at the Academy of Management; for more detail, see a preliminary report here.) In the first phase, we surveyed 300 women on parental leave, all based in Ireland and the UK, as they neared their return to work. At this stage, the women expressed concern about leaving their children, but also excitement about returning to work. In particular, they told us they were looking forward to getting back to the routine of working and to rejoining their colleagues.

To find out what happens after women return to work, we conducted a second phase of research. This phase involved a round of interviews with people at 28 organizations across a variety of sectors, including aviation, banking, pharmaceutical, professional services, and technology. All of these organizations were large employers with relatively sophisticated HR systems. Many were household names and leading global players in their sectors. In each of the companies, we interviewed a woman identified as a top performer who had returned to work in the six months preceding our interview, as well as her direct manager and a senior HR leader.

In this phase of our research, the women we spoke with told us that returning to work was tougher than they’d expected: They experienced a significant decline in positive emotions once they returned to work, reflecting the lived challenges of this transition. In many of the firms, parental leave was viewed as a major disruption. Our interviews found signs that women’s careers were derailed after returning from leave, that colleagues held unconscious biases against the returning women, and that professional relationships also deteriorated after returning from leave.

Yet we also heard many positive stories, from women who worked in companies where the managers recognized parental leave as no more than a brief interlude in a person’s long-term career. In those supportive company cultures, returning women reported a renewed energy and focus for their work, a feeling of being valued, and an enhancement of professional relationships.

Takeaways for Organizations

While most organizations spend heavily on onboarding programs for newcomers and graduate recruits, we found that almost none pay the same level of attention to reintegrating employees after parental leave. Our research points to six recommendations — three for HR leaders, and three for line managers:

Advice for HR leaders

• Support an organizational culture that positions parental leave as a brief interlude, not a major disruption. Healthy organizational cultures also focus on outputs over face time.
• Offer phased returns. Phased returns offer “check-in days” during leave and a gradual return that ramps up from three days a week to four, and then to five.
• Set up mentoring programs for returning employees, where you match high performers who are more experienced caregivers with high performers who are new parents. Another option could be group coaching or informal buddy systems.

Advice for line managers

• Create an open dialog with returning women. This should begin before maternity leave and include how to approach leave, the individual’s communication preferences while on leave, and the return phase. Make a specific plan for handovers at the start and the end of the leave.
• Check your assumptions about new parents’ career and family priorities. Some employees may need or request changes to their work schedule; others may not.
• Be aware that this is a deeply personal, individual transition for everyone — and that you play a crucial role in influencing the experience. Something as seemingly small as the timing of meetings can make a big difference. (For example, meetings in the early morning or late afternoon are often difficult for parents who are racing to or from daycare drop-off.)

What About the Length of Leave?

Our findings suggest that how the return is handled is typically more important than the actual length of leave. Perhaps the effect is less strong as the minimum entitlements are higher in our part of the world. In Ireland, for example, mothers get 26 weeks of paid leave in most instances and can take another 16 weeks unpaid with full legal protection. All of our respondents had 26 weeks of leave, with about half taking additional, unpaid leave of one to four months.

When leave is shorter than this, even a few extra weeks may make a large difference. In one high-profile example, Google increased leave from 12 weeks to 18, and in turn halved the rate at which new mothers quit. When Accenture doubled leave from eight weeks to 16, its turnover rate for new mothers fell by 40%.

Current evidence points to 26 weeks as optimal for some outcomes for mothers and their babies. However, policies that allow more than six months for mothers only, and do not permit the same to fathers, appear to exacerbate the gender divide in terms of career progression.

What About Dads?

While our study focused on new mothers, we did come across some nice examples of senior male leaders taking paternity leave and of companies that did a great job in sharing these stories and encouraging men to take paternity leave.

Many women in our research pointed to encouraging examples of senior male leaders in their organizations who also fulfilled primary or joint caregiving roles in their families. Supporting these initiatives at a societal and organizational level could represent a very positive step in increasing gender equality in time off for child care and in reducing the impact of maternity leave on mothers’ careers.

For example, in Sweden new parents are entitled to 480 days of subsidized leave per child, which parents can share as they wish. Three hundred and ninety of those days are paid at a rate of 80% of salary by the government, and each parent must take a minimum of three months. There is an increasing trend of better paternity leave around the world, and top companies in the U.S. are increasingly offering paternity leave.

It’s Not Just About Leave

In our study, we specifically focused on the factors that can help — or hinder — a woman’s return to work after maternity leave. But there is a lot more to being a parent than giving birth or filling out adoption papers. The most supportive companies recognize this, and continue to support working parents in a variety of creative ways.

For example, the top-performing companies in McKinsey’s recent research on women in the workplace are more likely to offer extended parental leave, as well as programs to smooth the transitions to and from the leave. But they are also more than twice as likely as those at the bottom of the distribution to offer emergency backup child care services, and three times as likely to offer on-site child care.

Our research clearly signals that the return to work after parental leave is a challenging transition for women, with a significant risk of career derailment. We identify some key changes that can significantly improve the experience of these mothers and lead to better outcomes for parents and organizations alike. Most of the changes we propose can be implemented without significant cost. A key point of departure is to reflect on the corporate culture around parental leave and to educate managers about how they can best work with returning mothers to ensure a smooth transition, with a focus on open conversations around their preferences.

from HBR.org https://ift.tt/2x2wxg4