My company has moved while I'm on maternity leave - and not told me!

[JessieEssex]

I am coming to the end of nine months of maternity leave. My company has made absolutely no effort to keep in touch with me, to the extent that my boss has not replied to my emails (friendly messages of the 'how are things going' variety). To top it all off, they moved half way across London over New Year, and I have had no official notification of this - I found out through a colleague I'm friends with on facebook! This would add 30 mins each way on to my commute.I have pretty much decided that I'm not going to go back, in part due to the way I have been ignored over the past 9 months. I feel like I have been kept so out of the loop that I would be starting my job from scratch. The office move is the last straw really. What I'd like to know is whether I am justified in feeling v v pi**ed off. Does a company have an obligation to keep you up to date while you're on mat leave? I'm not looking for a legal case or anything, I just want to tell them how useless I think they've been. Added to the shoddy way they treated me when I was pregnant, i feel no obligation to return to work for them and am quite looking forward to telling them so! Thanks in advance.

:( I don't have any advice for you but hopefully this will bump your thread.

Bumping for you- they do have an obligation and I think it sounds like they have behaved
Appallinfgly. I hope someone more knowledgeable is along soon.

There's no specific requirement to 'keep in touch', although it's very bad practice to ignore emails etc

There is a specific requirement to involve you in things like notification of office moves however. So you perfectly justified in telling them how useless they've been, for both reasons.

God, I can't believe that! I manage a lady currently on maternity leave, and we regularly send her info about everything that is going on, team meeting minutes, copies of circulars that are emailed to all staff, info about the Xmas lunch etc etc. My philosophy is how can we expect a valued member of the team to come back to work and be up to speed as soon as possible if she doesn't know what has been going on?

Surely that's part and parcel of managing someone on ML - you are not invisible you know, just not there at the moment!

You might have an argument for constructive dismissal if. as a result of them not telling you of a substantive change in your Ts and Cs, the child care arrangements that you had put in place are not suitable for the new location.

Before you went on maternity leave did you discuss with your manager the extent to which you wanted contact? There's such a variety of what women want from coming in for regular meetings to no contact at all (apart from bringing the baby in to be cooed over)that unless your manager asks it can be easy to get wrong. Agree that if you've sent emails they should have been replied to and of course they should have told you about the office move.