This is the first ‘idea’ in our Eight game-changing ideas for women at work series, published over the next two weeks.
What if women leaders were paid at their full weekly rate to work for 20 hours in the office during the first six months after their return from maternity leave?
The motherhood penalty has been well-documented but the burden on female managers and leaders presents like a double-jeopardy. Base salary and career advancement opportunities are often reduced if the return to work is anything less than full-time and yet for leaders the sheer responsibility and accountability for the role isn’t. I have always believed that companies get a good deal from women who return to work after maternity leave. They pack five days’ work into the two to four days that they are there, work relentlessly through the day as though they don’t have a minute to waste (because they don’t have) and then also accept 24/7 accountability.
It wasn’t much of a leap for me to imagine what it might be like if companies remunerated women leaders during the maternity transition period for the responsibility and accountability of the job, rather than hours worked in the office. It happened to me.
When I was heavily pregnant with my second child, an international French publishing company hired me for a leadership role knowing that within a couple of months I would be on maternity leave. “Is this a problem for you?” I was asked during my initial meeting with the executive team. “Not if it isn’t for you,” was my response.
It wasn’t simply a clever ploy to encourage me to join the company – although it would have worked if it had been. True to the initial signaling, the company entered into a contract with me that was a bit like: for better or worse, in maternity leave and in all other life choices. We agreed a set of employment conditions and it was left to me to work out how I was going to deliver the agreed outcome given my obvious impending life change.
Two months after joining the business I was on maternity leave. But my salary never reflected that. It remained unchanged, at full executive rate. That was because the company still held me fully accountable for the results during that period. It was my second child so my original plan was to work from home during the first four months and then part-time for the next two. The morning after giving birth by c-section, my (horrified) obstetrician arrived to find me hooked up to a drip while choosing the cover for the relaunch issue. From the second week of maternity leave I was spending most Fridays in the office for team and client meetings, with baby in tow. I have told the story many times over of presenting the relaunch of my magazine to the Marketing Director of Lancôme while she changed my baby’s nappy. Within six months we were achieving the results that the company had appointed me to deliver, and for most of that time I was on some form of maternity leave.
The reason that I never stopped working or thinking about working during my maternity leave and the transition back was that my company had invested in my leadership of the business and I wasn’t going to let them down. Not every woman who is transitioning back from maternity leave to full-time employment will want the pressure of knowing that they will be expected to be fully accountable for an outcome that will need to be delivered regardless. Certainly not all babies or family set-ups make it easy to feel as though that commitment can be signed up to. But this fantastic future state of maternity leave transition where a woman is paid for the job and not the hours must be a two-way street. It needs to work for the organisation too. Direct reports will need to know that you are always available to them. Management and boards will need to feel they can contact you at any time. That is what it actually will look like if women are paid for the role and not the hours in the office.
I only have two switches: completely on or completely off, so it was always going to work for me. I loved receiving work to approve to my home via fax machine (old school-style, 17 years ago) each day and taking phone calls from the team who would also regularly come around to my home for brainstorming sessions. I welcomed the chance to get out of a t-shirt, throw on a suit and present to commercial partners because I could take my baby with me. At short notice I was able to head into the city to meet with my Managing Director to discuss the state of the business and he never had an issue with the fact that I was usually accompanied by my baby. You must be willing to miss a mother’s group or baby gym class to take a work meeting. However doctor’s appointments, sick children and any type of formal leave should be dealt with as they would be if you were working from the office full-time. It shouldn’t be an invitation to feel as though you need to be a slave to the business.
It comes back to trust and budget. The company needs to trust that you can and will deliver, regardless of personal circumstance and the women transitioning will need to understand that the total budget isn’t likely to increase to accommodate extra resources to assistant you during your hours away from the office.
But as we already know, most women leaders and managers already carry with them the burden of full responsibility and accountability for the role that they are paid less to do during the maternity transition period because usually the salary gap is used to fund a contract resource to alleviate the workload. So perhaps we are really only talking about an attitude shift from both employer and employee.
This is a flexible transition arrangement I believe has and could work for many leaders. How, in an ideal world for women at work, could a form of ‘maternity transition’ work for you?