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Congratulations, you’re pregnant! Now you may be wondering how to handle your career whilst you are on maternity leave? Here are a few tips from the annual Managing Maternity course run by Dr. Suzanne Doyle-Morris for womenintechnology, next to be held on 24th April 2009 at the womenintechnology offices in central London. If you would like to come along for an engaging full interactive day of looking at strategies to keep your IT career on track, during and after maternity leave, please contact Sarah Lilley on slilley@womenin.co.uk, or on 020 7422 9213.
It’s an exciting time- thinking about how things will be different after the baby arrives. If you want to keep your career on track while you’re away it pays to take a bit of time to think about how your maternity leave and becoming a mother will affect your career. The Handover: How well the handover of your responsibilities is conducted will ultimately reflect upon you, regardless of whether you get support from others. Find out as soon as possible if you will be getting dedicated maternity cover or if your responsibilities will be shared between your colleagues. In either case, it is important to begin to create a manual of your responsibilities detailing not just the basic information, but exceptions and how you manage various relationships. While you may not have much time leading up to your due date, do not leave this until the last month before you go. Most women feel that a handover should be relatively straightforward. When they actually begin to document all that they do, find it is far more time-consuming than they realised. Additionally, should you be put on bed rest or be forced to leave work earlier than you anticipate, (which is more common than you think) you do not want to leave without having drawn up very detailed directions – as this will unfortunately reflect poorly on you (when things go wrong, it is always easy to blame the person who is not at work!). Also, make sure you meet and work with your cover or colleagues so that they can ask you any questions that may not have occurred to you. Working with Your Manager: While you may be delighted with your pregnancy, women often take it very personally if our manager’s initial reaction is less than enthusiastic. They are human and their first reaction to any news is to question how it will affect them. In this case, your manager will be concerned about how your responsibilities will be handled whilst you are away and if you are planning on returning. Be positive about your return, even if you are uncertain about how long exactly you would like to take off or even if you want to return. If you are not upbeat about coming back, it is only understandable for them to wonder, which could unwittingly undermine your career and future opportunities.
Keeping in Touch: The women I coach who are able to make the most successful transition back to work after maternity leave are those who keep in contact during their leave, networking with both key stakeholders and even contacts outside the company. If you return to a job that is not to your liking or indeed are made redundant, it pays to have used some of your leave to develop new contacts. Additionally, without staying in touch you run the risk of “being out of sight, out of mind” and could potentially miss being considered for opportunities in the future. Use your allotment of 10 Keeping in Touch days to come back for high profile meetings, presentations to clients or training days. Make sure you get secure childcare for these days, as having to opt out at the last minute because of childcare could undermine your reputation as a new working mother and concern colleagues who will be looking to rely on you once you return.
One of the most helpful hints for women is to be easy on yourself while on leave. I don’t mean “spa days” exactly, but accept help when it is offered. Like most high achieving women in IT, you are self-reliant and may not be used to accepting help from others. Additionally, new motherhood is a huge undertaking and will feel like a “project” that is beyond your day to day control - a baby will cry, sleep, eat when it wants to rather than doing things on your timetable. Similarly, there is no right or wrong answer regarding length of leave. I have worked with expectant mums who anticipate taking a year out only to find they want to return to the world of adult companionship after 4 months. Likewise, I have worked with other mothers who plan to regularly check e-mail in the weeks right after the birth, only to discover after delivery that they want to take a full year, or even longer, off work. There is no one right answer, the key is being easy on yourself and not judging how you actually feel against how you thought you would or should feel.
Childcare: A common problem for many new mums who are about to return to work is relying on one nursery or type of childcare for full time care of your baby. This leaves you very vulnerable if a problem arises – the homesick nanny who wants to quit, the nursery that turns out to be terrible after the baby’s first week and so on. A good idea is to start your baby with whichever type of childcare provision you are going to use, a week or two before you are actually due back at work. This will allow any “teething problems” to come to light as well as getting you emotionally ready for being apart from your child. Additionally, make sure you have a back- up plan in case of sickness or other emergencies. I have worked with more than one woman whose career was nearly hindered because she did not have any trustworthy friends from NCT, relatives or local childminders nearby. Do not wait until you are back at work to discuss with your partner how drop-off’s and pick-ups will work and who will realistically leave work early if the child becomes ill. It is certainly not fair that most of the responsibility of childminding falls to mothers, but you and your partner need to be honest as to what you will each do when these issues undoubtedly arise. Managing Expectations: When you return to work it’s vital to get an idea of how your role has changed early on. In the fast moving world of IT, you may find you are returning to a new team, new project, new technology and depending on how long you were away, a completely different job. If you have kept in touch with your manager and team, or started to make inroads with the team to which you have been moved, this should not be as difficult but you will still need to keep your political ear to the ground. This is the time to link up with other working mothers and learn how they set precedents, especially if you would like to negotiate a reduced work week, flexible working hours or working from home. This is when the offer of a cup of coffee or lunch does not go amiss! As IT is still male-dominated you will have to look for other women’s stories, as even if there are policies in place, most women find they are able to negotiate better conditions based on their relationship with their boss. Also, be easy on yourself, and don’t hold yourself to the hours that you may have been able to give to the job before. Most working mothers find they are able to focus on the job at hand and still complete as much as their colleagues even on fewer hours than before. Most of the guilt we feel for working fewer hours does not come from colleagues and a less productive workload. Rather it is self-generated, when we compare who we were as working women to who we are now as working mothers – a comparison that is unhelpful and unfair to us as professional women.
Dr Suzanne Doyle-Morris is an executive coach with a passion for helping female executives succeed and is a regular presenter for Women in Technology. She has a background in women’s issues, a Ph.D. from Cambridge University that explored the experiences of successful women in male-dominated fields, and a background working with women at UBS, Cisco, Clifford Chance, O2 and Microsoft. She is uniquely qualified to help female executives succeed, particularly in traditionally male-dominated industries and has a book on this fascinating topic coming out in spring 2009. To read her blog or download a free tip sheet for successful women in these fields, please visit www.doylemorris.com.
