Power of the Parent 13: S6 Ep13: Helping Someone Prepare for Parental Leave

Look for a book on preparing to become a parent, and you’re hit with a tsunami of the things. Cast your eyes around to devour something that includes the workplace angle too and you’ll be hard pushed to find it. But it’s an incredibly important step and one that we can’t continue to overlook and assume great engagement for parents in the workplace happens by accident.In this episode we’re talking about three things you need to know about helping someone prepare for parental leave. There’s heaps we could cover with this topic, so I’ve kept it to the point and with a blend of practical action and some bigger reflections to consider.

The three things are:

The further resources I mentioned in the episode can be found on the Power of the Parent® Employer Resource Hub here – https://power-of-the-parent.com/employer-resource-hub/Please do rate, review and subscribe if you find this podcast useful – it helps people find it and ultimately get the calls to action out in the world. It makes Charlotte feel great too 😆

For further info on Power of the Parent you can head to our website http://www.power-of-the-parent.com or connect to the founder, Charlotte Speak on LinkedIn.

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Episode Transcript

Hello and welcome to Power of the Parent, the podcast. This series is a new format and we are going to be focusing on a different topic each week, bringing you three things you need to know about whatever that may be, mainly from an employer perspective. But of course, there’s plenty of reframing that parents could do to benefit from the content as well.

We will be covering everything from parental leave transitions, managing boundaries, what to do when your talent pipeline looks a bit dodgy, tips on gathering feedback, and things like establishing parental support networks.  So let’s dive in. 

Hello and welcome to another episode of Power of the Parent, Three Things You Need to Know About.  In today’s episode, we are talking about how to help someone prepare for parental leave. There’s so many conversations and advice dished out about becoming a parent, however that might happen for someone. But it is rarer, I would say, to hear the same level of vigour applied to conversations about preparing from a workplace context. Whilst many of us will subscribe to the focus on the path to parenthood, it’s a finite amount of time. You can see from the beginning, it can leave the breadcrumbs for parents to feel like they’re not following the norm if they have one eye on their career.  So how can we help someone prepare for parental leave? I regularly hear from line managers and business leaders that they’re worried that it’s going to put a pressure on, or they might say the wrong thing so I thought we could take this episode to bring some practical tips to life.

So the three things we’re going to talk about are  contracting on contact, number two, focus on strengths, and number three, watch your language. So let’s dive in.  

So point number one, contract on contact,  which is a bit of a mouthful, and I know contracting sounds really formal. So please feel free to swap in whatever word is more meaningful to you here.

But at the heart of it, it’s about setting some expectations and boundaries and getting clarity where you can. For example, talking to your team member about the kinds of things they’d like to hear about, or not hear about, while they’re away from the business is a very simple and great start.

One very low maintenance tool I love to use with clients is a comms grid. This is where you build up an overview, basically, of what is being communicated, how frequently, by what format and who is doing it.

So it could literally be anything whatsoever. Perhaps it’s a company update and it’s once a quarter and the format is via email and you as the line manager are going to do it. Or perhaps it could be a project update and the person who’s going on parental leave has asked if that can be every month and they’d like that to be a phone call, and the most ideal person is the person who is covering their parental leave. So you start to build up, literally a grid of what that could look like. Now, remember it might change along the way because sometimes we just don’t know what we don’t know, but it is definitely worth giving it a start point. I worked with a client probably two years ago now who  was going on maternity leave. She started her maternity leave wanting updates every two weeks. She was in the insurance industry.  It was quite a peak time for them and for client renewals. Initially, she said she wanted these updates every, every two weeks. The reality when she actually got into it was that she didn’t need the updates every two weeks. And nor did she want them, actually, what felt better was sort of every couple of months.  There was more to update. It meant that she was properly kind of focusing on being a parent and not trying to dish out advice to the person that was covering her role because she had all sorts of different dynamics going on and that were at play.

So if she’d have stuck to her original thoughts,  that didn’t work.  She was definitely given the opportunity to know that it was flexible. So making sure that you’re saying to somebody, this is based on how you feel today, but ultimately we appreciate that that might change. 

So the second point is to focus on strengths. Now something synonymous with becoming a parent is that lurking upheaval it can have on your identity. I’ve heard it from all parents, but although I’ve no stats to back this up whatsoever, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say it disproportionately impacts mums the most.  Enter your strengths. 

This tip is all about encouraging your valued team members to note down what they love doing, where they add value and what you see in them and the things that they’re really proud of achieving. As an exercise pre parental leave, it can help them stay connected with their professional identity with kind of who they are, where they add value, and it can help set them up with something when it comes to reconnecting when they return. Of course, things can shift over time and it’s definitely an exercise to revisit when somebody is returning. But again, it’s that start point that they wouldn’t otherwise have had.

And finally, watch your language. So knowing that your seat is going to be kept warm rather than you are being replaced is a really powerful distinction. I’ve seen firsthand some pretty dodgy repercussions and assumptions that come from very finite language and words flung about that could really signal someone is leaving a company for good. 

Another favorite has been hearing people say that you’re getting ready for your baby holiday, for those who are about to birth a child. And I can assure you, it’s nobody’s description of a holiday. 

So, have a think about the way someone going on parental leave in your company is described. How do you frame a handover? How are you keeping someone engaged who is temporarily stepping away from the business? It could be some really simple language swaps. You could even ask for some confidential feedback or examples of tricky moments when this kind of thing has actually happened to someone,  not to use it against anybody, of course, but to build a realistic picture of how easy it is to overlook the impact of the words we’re using.

And you can, you can build up a very,    in my opinion, handy this is what you should say, or this is what you could say, and this is what you absolutely shouldn’t be saying kind of resource for people. 

That’s all for this week. You can find further resources on the Employer Resource Hub on the Power of the Parent website, which I’ll leave a link in the show notes for. 

I’ll be back next week with an expert guest talking about three things you need to know about parents at work and sleep.

 Thank you so much for joining me for another episode of Power of the Parent with podcast. If you have got a few spare minutes, who am I kidding? Of course you haven’t got a few spare minutes, but if you would like to choose to spend a few of your minutes  giving me any sort of review or rating, I would massively appreciate it.

It does help other people find it. And it also lets me know that I’m hitting the spot with listeners. For more free resources, you can head to the show notes. where you’ll find a link to the Power of the Parent website, or do head on over to LinkedIn and give me a follow. Search Charlotte Speak and my grinning face should pop up.

Until next time, take care.