No Desk to Come Back To

I had one of the best jobs of my career. A strong team, real momentum, work I was proud of. Then I went out on maternity leave with my son, and while I was away, my boss told me the job was too big to keep open.

That was the reality of the situation, and I couldn't really argue with it. The organisation needed someone permanent in that seat, and so did the team I'd built. Understanding the logic didn't make it any easier to sit with.

The part nobody prepares you for

Going out was hard. Coming back was harder.

Out of sight, out of mind. I don't say that bitterly. There are a hundred priorities competing for attention in any organisation on any given day, and a person on leave simply isn't in the room to compete for them.

I remember the day I came back clearly, because I remember exactly where I sat. Not at a desk that had been kept for me. At the desk of a colleague who happened to be on holiday that week, because nobody had worked out where I was actually going to go.

Nobody was being cruel. That's the part worth sitting with. It was a small, practical failure. A gap in a process that nobody owned. But small, practical failures are exactly the kind that tell a person what their return is actually worth to the organisation, whatever the maternity policy document says.

What the absence of a plan actually communicates

I've since sat on the other side of that table, as a CHRO responsible for how transitions like this were handled across an organisation. And I've come to think the desk isn't really the point. The desk is just the visible evidence of something bigger.

A woman going on maternity leave is not leaving the organisation. She's stepping out of one phase of a long career and expecting to step back into another. Most companies plan meticulously for the first move and not at all for the second. There's a checklist for the leave itself, for pay, for legal compliance. There is rarely one for the return.

That gap gets filled by silence. No contact during the leave beyond what's legally required. No conversation, before the return date, about what the role looks like now or who's covering what. No one accountable for making sure there's somewhere to actually sit on day one. Each of those gaps is small on its own. Together, they add up to a clear message about how replaceable she was, delivered at the exact moment she's least equipped to hear it.

What a better process actually looks like

None of this needs to be complicated or expensive to fix. It needs to be owned.

A light touchpoint during leave, at intervals the person actually wants, so the return doesn't feel like walking back into a stranger's building. A conversation two or three weeks before the return date about what's changed, what the workload looks like, and what support is in place. A named person, not HR in the abstract but an actual manager, responsible for making sure the basics are sorted before day one. A desk being one of them, but so is a realistic first month, rather than an assumption that she'll simply pick up exactly where she left off.

None of that is generous. It's ordinary management, applied to a transition that happens to be predictable months in advance. Most organisations manage a new hire's first week with more care than they manage the return of someone they've already invested years in.

Why this is worth the attention

The women who experience a return like mine don't always leave straight away. Plenty stay, deliver, and quietly recalibrate what they expect from the place. They stop assuming it will notice. They stop assuming it will remember. And an organisation that has taught its most experienced people not to expect much from it has taught them something that's very hard to unteach later.

How a company handles the return from maternity leave isn't a footnote to its culture. For the people going through it, and for everyone watching how it's handled, it's a fairly accurate preview of what the whole organisation actually values when nobody's forcing the question.

If you're an HR leader working through how your organisation supports parents through leave and return, I'm always glad to talk it through. You can reach me at info@rachelsheehan.com or find out more at rachelsheehan.com.