Has anyone else been sorting out their own maternity cover?
I work in a medium sized business – we have a business owner, several directors, then under each director are a number of departments. I am the head of one of these departments. We don’t really have a lot to do with our director – day to day I work with my team, in quite a specialised role and have occasional meetings with my boss/owner, but no particular work relationship with my director, apart from occasionally going to him with HR related issues (in fact he is responsible for a different area entirely and doesn’t have any knowledge of or interest in our department’s work).
I go off for maternity leave at the beginning of August. I have said that we need to recruit fairly soon and no-one has really paid any attention. I have finally had the go ahead from the owner to recruit, but no-one else seems to really want to have any input into it, and it seems I am really expected just to get on with it, organise a handover, then return without anyone else having to bother with it. I usually recruit for my department, but it feels in this case, as this person won’t be working for me, that there should be more of an input from those that they will be working for in the recruitment and selection of my cover – it sort of feels like they think I’m still responsible for the department while I’m on maternity leave, even though I’m know, technically I’m not. We have a lot of tight deadlines in the next year and my biggest concern is that the person I take on will be left to it and if they don’t meet them, then I will be held responsible (even though I’m writing as thorough a handover document as possible, I have a very heavy and complex workload and I think they will struggle to pick it all up in the handover period).
Has anyone got any tips or comments on how much involvement I should expect and how to deal with this situation?