Extended leave and parental leave are some of the most difficult to manage situations for HR leaders. They often go hand in hand with a life event that is sensitive and tricky to discuss. There are parental leaves, of course, but there are also bereavement leaves, sick leaves, compassionate care leaves, burnout, and more. All of these types of leaves share a similar throughline…they involve a disruptive life event. What comes along with a disruptive life event? Emotions, anxiety, and uncertainty. 

Managers and HR teams are not necessarily trained to deal with heavy emotions or assuage anxieties, and they are not expected to have that skill set. However, there are things they should know to be able to manage these delicate situations with more ease and compassion.

1. Death by a thousand papercuts is a brutal way to go.
   
   More often than not, mismanagement of leave results in a retention issue. Sometimes, people are being stealthily “forced out”, but, usually, there is a genuine desire to welcome team members back into the fold. Even in those situations, people leave. There is not one big mistake that happens. Instead, there are many small things that pile up and make people who are newly back from leave feel under-valued and cast aside. I was recently speaking with a friend who was describing her experience back from a medical leave. Her job responsibilities and title were changed without consulting her. Then, she was expected to continue “consulting” on her previous responsibilities even though she had had her title “stripped” from her. Another friend explained that her company was going through a buyout at the end of her maternity leave and they asked her to come back from leave a few weeks early to help with the transition. She accepted the early return but when she got to the office her permissions hadn’t been reinstated, nor was her equipment ready to be returned to her. She sat around the office for two weeks before she was actually able to log back into her email. Needless to say, she quit less than two months later. Small things like not having access to the server, and bigger things like a title change, all add up. Once you pass a certain point, you can’t help but feel disrespected– and it is hard to come back from that. 

2. The organization changes just as much as the parent

It is a given that an employee who goes on a parental leave will change over the course of 12-ish months. There are hormonal changes, financial changes, sleep schedule changes, priority changes. All that is true! What is also true is that organizations change over the course of 12 months. Especially faster-moving organizations like tech firms, whose product changes quickly and whose business objectives are dynamic. One new parent I interviewed told me that she came back from maternity leave on the same day as another new employee was starting at the company. The new employee was given a full onboarding package and schedule. The returning employee was given nothing at all even though her team was completely different, there had been 3 acquisitions, and her team had started using all new software since she left. 

3. There is more to leave than tracking absences

Tracking absences is important, but leave is about so much more than dates on a calendar. There are government programs to navigate, benefits to understand, CNESST requirements, company policies and rules that can be confusing, especially when you’re already going through a major life event. Underneath all of that are emotions and reactions to uncertainty. I’ve personally had the experience of feeling a bit like a line item during maternity leave. It honestly wasn’t a huge deal for me because I had a great relationship with my boss, and she made me feel valued as a human being. But not all managerial skills are created equal, and we shouldn’t rely on having a great manager to make leave feel human. We need cultures where people feel comfortable asking questions and can get clear, helpful, non-judgmental answers that recognize them as people, not simply absences to administer. On that note…

4. Not all People Management Skills are created equal 

Many people move into managerial roles because they have great technical skills in their area of expertise. As subject matter experts, they can discern what is best for their business unit. Many managers do not rise the ranks because they are excellent at and love people management. People management involves very different skills than say, programming or product development. However, people make up the team. One of my professors in the Organization Development department used to say that his client, the founder of a well-known CPG food brand, always complained that: “business would be so easy if it weren’t for the people!”. Relatable. 

5. Unclear ownership, fragmented systems, and undocumented institutional knowledge are the secret killers

Managing parental leave is a complex process involving many departments and people. The employee going on leave is obviously a part of the process, as is their direct manager, their teammates, HR, and payroll, and probably IT or facilities…Then there are insurance issues and laws that affect how leave is administered, and so on. There is often one person who holds all of that together, probably on a spreadsheet outside of the official HRIS (because classic HRIS is not built to manage leave in this way). But what happens when that person leaves the company or goes on their own leave? Where do all of those small moving pieces land? Just like death by a thousand papercuts is a real risk for employees who experience a mismanaged leave, it is also a real risk for the administrator, who is manually taking care of everything within a system not built for handling complex human issues.