AIBU about being treated unfairly after maternity leave?

[CluelessToddlerMum]

Before mat leave, I was at a high point in my career so far. I was high achieving and had a good reputation. Prior to returning from mat leave, it was agreed that I could return on 3 days per week in the same role (different team due to structural changes whilst I was off but still same sort’ve role) but my workload would be adjusted.

Upon returning, I had the same job title but was barely given any work to do - told that I could “settle back in”. After a few weeks, I raised concerns that I didn’t have enough work and that the remits of my role were confusing. My role felt like an after thought. Following a discussion with my manager, they reviewed my role remit and I was given a bit more responsibility. It’s been 3 months total now. During this time, I’ve had a fair bit of time off due to my child being unwell a lot because of unavoidable nursery bugs. Due to this and being 3 days per week, I’ve found it difficult settling back in as I’ve found it hard to get into the swing of it and I’m always playing catch up. It’s a very fast paced business. I’ve been open with my manager about this and a plan was agreed to help me catch up what I missed on my non-working days quicker. The following week, concerns were raised to me about the amount of time off I’ve had. The week after that, I’ve been told that it’s been decided it’s not possible to do my role in 3 days and I’m being moved to another role entirely.

I know they’re probably within their right to do what they’ve done, but I feel like I haven’t been given a fair opportunity to see if my role is possible in 3 days per week as for the first month, my role remit was unclear and then I’ve had no choice but to take time off to look after a sick child. Also a plan was agreed to help, but then only given a week to see if it would help before being moved on. I feel as though all the hard work I’ve put in over the last 10 years in my job has been forgotten, I feel undervalued and I feel as though I’m being managed out.

I don’t know what to do from here or what I want to happen. I also don’t know if I’m just being sensitive. AIBU? Does anyone have any advice?

If you have a partner who dies shy work away, you should start sharing sick days with them.

@CluelessToddlerMum i could have written this. I left work about 6 weeks ago due to being managed out and whilst they make the right sounds they actually aren’t giving you support to do the role. The fact you had no workload shows you are an excess really to the team but they have to keep you on. Literally the exact same happened to me; and whilst they allowed me to go part time, I had no client base allocated so literally had nothing to do. To top it off, they underpaid me in my final paycheque so they now owe me money.

I have resigned myself to having another year at home, keeping a part time nursery place, doing some other projects and going back to work at a later date.

I don’t know know of a single woman in real life who hasn’t had a shit time in one way or another going back to work after maternity.

You've not been treated unfairly. They've accommodated you as much as they can. As long as your new role is on the same grade.

You do need to decide which is your priority as it’s really not possible to have it all in these circumstances.

if you want to keep on the same career trajectory without any hiatus, then as others have said, your child’s father needs to do a significant proportion of the sick days, you need to keep an eye on emails on non working days and answer those which will help your colleagues keep their own plates spinning, and you absolutely cannot miss deadlines. So if the child is sick, you’ve left work early or taken a day off and a deadline is looming, you need to work after the child has gone to sleep to meet your deadline even after if you have taken the day as annual leave.

The alternative is that you accept that your career will stall for a few years because your top priority is to be there for your child and enjoy these early years of parenthood. So you continue to do the bulk of the sick days, only work your paid hours, leave on the dot to pick the child up from nursery and can’t be relied upon to hit a deadline. Best case, you stay in a dead end role but don’t get promoted. Worst case, as you r seen, you get sidelined to a less prestigious role and in the future may find that your role is marked for redundancy.

The good news is that the early childhood years go past quite quickly and once all your children are in school, assuming you have decent childcare particularly over school holidays, you can pick your career back up (often by moving to a new company where you don’t have the baggage of being that work to rule mum) and start to progress again. There are loads of women in senior positions in interesting jobs who have a family. There are fewer of us in those positions who have pre school age children though!

I’d give the charity ‘pregnant then screwed’ a call. They’ll have a much better understanding of what is reasonable and what isn’t than most of us on mumsnet. They’ll be able to help you navigate it all too.

Returning from maternity leave is a funny time. You’re trying to get into the swing of things and so is your baby.

Personally I found a new job whilst on maternity leave as I knew my old workplace would be unsuitable regardless of how much they would talk the talk about being supportive. It was fast pasted and excessive out of hours working was often required.

My new job has higher pay, doing work I enjoy in a business where work life balance is valued.

A change in your work to better suit your new lifestyle doesn’t need to be a step back or a step off the career ladder as PP have suggested.

4 times in 3 months is a lot - how many days in total?

If you've taken a full year off for maternity your employer doesn't have to give your original role back to you buy they have to give you a similar role. It could be that you constantly playing catch up is affecting the business and they have to act on that.
I know how shit it is returning from maternity leave, I recently returned after a year off and my 25th anniversary of working for the company passed a couple of weeks before I returned, nothing has been mentioned, no thanks, card etc, yet my team mate recently got £1000 for 10 years. Bitter pill to swallow.
I actually feel like an outsider looking in now.
I wasn't invited to the Christmas meal last year either 🤷‍♀️

I have worked 3 days per week for 2.5 years since having my first DD. I have just gone off on mat leave again to have DC#2.

I have to be honest I have had the opposite problem where I am generally expected to get through an almost full time workload in 24 hours per week and it's hard. I end up working unpaid over time to keep on top of it. Which just hides the issue. I have had 2 jobs in that time (changed around 16 months ago). The 2nd employer is slightly better with regards to this.

As I only work 3 days but husband works 5 in a less stressful role if our daughter is ill he tends to take time off and we have also been lucky to have support from grandparents.

It's very hard being a working mother in terms of actually trying to maintain a decent career. Can you try talking to them again. The Autumn of the first year in nursery is the worst for bugs so likely the amount of illnesses will start to reduce x

I don't think they've been overly accomodating. I think it sounds like the bare minimum I'd personally expect. You've given them 10 years of (presumably very good, if you've risen to senior level) service. 3 months part time is not a lot of time to get settled and adjust into a role and establish if its working or not. Sometimes (poor) senior managers can be quite short-termist.

yeah I could barely get past this either

I don't understand why they have taken issue with this then? Annual Leave is there to be used. And presumably they've approved it.

Why does it matter if you take ad hoc AL across 3 months or a fortnight off once a quarter or so? It's AL built into your employment rights.

I think you a being a bit unreasonable because you have already had the huge win of them agreeing to part-time hours in a demanding environment. Yes it’s common to go back pt after maternity leave, but it’s by no means a given. They don’t have to agree! You can leave, but it can also be pretty hard to get a role advertised as part-time as naturally a lot of women want them. The competition can be fierce. Trust me on this because I am writing from experience!

I had a well-paid senior leadership role before maternity leave (working 55-60 hours per week) and my flexible working request was turned down. It was full time or nothing. At which point I left. I felt as if I had given so much but been cast out from the system. I had to cancel the nursery place that I had lined up (London, so it cost a fortune) so was then in the double bind of no job and no childcare. It then took me more than a year to find a new part-time job (even way below my original pay-grade) as every woman and her sister were after those roles! Oh and during that year my (D)H decided that he ‘wasn’t sure’ about our relationship…It was not a good time!

In the long run they did me a favour as I moved on to much better things, but it felt truly awful to go through it and my confidence plummeted.

To be honest, you probably made a bit of an error in complaining about not having enough work. You would have been better off keeping quiet, being grateful for the lull and letting things pick up gradually.

I would take the new role graciously, show appreciation (even if you don’t feel it) and make the best of it.

@MaybeDoctor just because it’s a shit standard generally for women returning to work doesn’t mean we should all just put up & shut up.. I wonder when things will really change. Maybe when the birth rate is so low companies have no employees as there’s so few people in the workforces?? Perhaps then people will place some value on parents both in wider society and the workplace.

Also I don’t think taking 4 bouts of annual leave in 3 months is unreasonable at all - you’ve earned it and it’s your right to use it and be paid for it.

@babyproblems Yes, it is shit and trust me I was so angry about my own situation - I mean, what a waste of all my training and experience in a shortage occupation! - that I wrote an article about the need for flexible working in the national trade publication for my sector. My union were useless btw, the regional rep accompanied me to the meeting and just shrugged her shoulders and said: 'I can see they're not going to agree'.

There are two aspects at play here - the bigger picture (which you rightly say shouldn't be accepted) and the psychology of handling the people immediately involved.

The problem is that if the OP irritates her management further by not accepting the new role then she may well be be side-lined, have life made uncomfortable or be made redundant in the not too distant future.

most annual leave is planned for in advance, I would imagine that the OP is taking it at very short notice, and that can cause issues with cover etc

I think some of the views on this thread jar with the realities of a professional career.

The employer isn’t a parent with a responsibility to financially provide for an employee and work around their wants or lives. It’s intended to be a mutually beneficial arrangement - the employer has a job which needs to be done for which they pay a fair salary, and the employee does that job to the employer’s expectations in return for the salary.

Good employers will try and keep good employees if they can by offering part time or flexible working patterns if this is consistent with the job being performed and meets their business needs - clearly a theatre nurse can’t choose to work at a different time of day to the rest of the surgical team or walk out of a surgery early if it hasn’t gone to plan and the same applies for lots of roles. But a tax accountant for example could probably work 3 days a week and flexibly.

It’s pretty clear from what the OP has posted that she isn’t providing the employer with the work output they need - whether that’s based on volume or speed of delivery - and rather than just saying it isn’t working for them and she needs to shape up or ship out, they are trying to see whether she can deliver value in another part of the business. The hard truth though is that if the amount or kind of work which the OP is able to deliver based on her caring commitments is not what her employer needs, or not worth the salary being paid to the OP, they are entitled to say it doesn’t work for them. Just because she has worked for them for a while doesn’t mean they have any obligation legal or moral to support her financially if she doesn’t want to do the role she was employed for adequately. And this is only fair to the other employees who may be child free, older parents, or investing in good quality childcare, who should not be expected to pick up the OP’s slack for no extra salary and would likely mutiny if they were asked to do so.

You do realise that some companies do not allow return to PT ?

The department I worked in was FT only

A couple of people asked for PT & were declined, but they were offered PT in other departments on a lower salary due to change of job & hours

The point that I am making is that they have allowed you a PT job

Some interesting perspectives on this thread - seems to me there are two sides - the employers legal (and moral?) obligations and the reality of working mums (and other main caregivers) - to me they just don’t match currently. I think employers should be forced to do more to accommodate and there should be much better state support for new parents. As it is society nor the majority of employers see much value in new children or their parents’ especially mothers. As I said in a previous pp, I don’t know a single woman who has ‘been fine’ or had a good experience going back to work after maternity leave.

I had a good experience but I think that's for two reasons.

I went back full time
I took a shorter maternity leave.

To be fair most privately owned business priority is marking a profit so they are Commerical. They are not all altruistic where they're main concern is promoting the work place for new mothers . If they can make accommodations then of course they should but you can't expect free reign to be given to working mothers regarding hours and absence levels , it's simply not practical in most businesses .

Yes, but the company has agreed to the part time role. The op doesn’t need to be grateful; the company was happy to agree to it. So the op should not diminish her own expectations and rights out of some ‘allowance’ the company has made.

#1 the role turn turned out to have less duties/responsibilities than the hours warranted

#2 the op felt under-used for the hours she was employed for

#3 her new-to-nursery child needed her to take four days unplanned leave

#4 all this has happened within a few short months. If the op were a new employee she’d be only halfway through her six month probation.

The company is mealy mouthed if agreeing to part-time post-maternity, and then ‘failing’ the op after three months.

3 days is hard for a senior role in a fast paced business. As a pp says if you're doing consecutive days it's even harder.

I did two days and two half days. It's not the most cost effective way to pay for nursery, that's for sure, but it meant I was never out of the office for a really long time. And I wasn't coming in to 30 emails and behind before I had even started.

I wouldn’t have complained about not having enough work to do 😆

OP does need to help herself too though. She made it harder for herself by asking for extra work which she couldn't then complete and taking more unplanned leave than her DH when it was possible to share it out more evenly or even have DH take more at first whilst she adjusted.

^This

We also don't know that OP only had 4 days leave - she says she took annual leave (presumably at short notice) 4 times.

if she only works 3 days a week that could have been a significant proportion of her working time.