This research request has been e-mailed to past coachees who meet certain criteria. Please only REGISTER HERE if you have received an e-mail inviting you to be part of this research.

Summary of Research

Qualitative research methods will be employed to follow-up with, and understand the experiences of, women who had ‘comeback coaching’* to support their return to work after maternity leave. Specifically, the research will explore:

1. What endured from the coaching experience at the follow-up point (6-24 months post cessation of coaching programme).
2. If there are things not explored in the coaching at the time which in hindsight would have been useful to them.

The study will explore the experiences of 10-20 women who were coached by one of the associate coaches in the author’s business (but not by the author herself) via semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis will be used to make sense of their experiences.

*Comeback coaching is a term first used by the author around 2012 to describe coaching with people returning to work after an extended period of leave. The author’s work at the time was primarily with women returning to their jobs after maternity leave. “Maternity coaching” is a term used in the executive coaching community and in the literature to describe coaching a woman during the time she is peri-natal (before and after birth) with specific reference to her work.

The author believes the term is open to misunderstanding because the word ‘maternity’ is more closely linked to the act of giving birth and physical changes in a woman’s body during matrescence, than to a woman’s work whilst she is pregnant, and therefore it could be assumed that the coaching is about supporting women through these things.

The author developed the term comeback coaching to both better represent the focus of this type of coaching and in acknowledgement that this type of coaching is applicable to employees returning to work after other types of (planned and unplanned) periods of extended leave, such as sickness absence, adoption leave, shared parental leave and carers leave.

The author describes comeback coaching to potential coachees and the HR professionals as “A collaborative solution-focused, results-orientated and systematic process in which the coach facilitates the enhancement of work performance, life experience, self-directed learning and personal growth of the coachee during the time of preparing for and/or coming back from a period of leave from work.” This is adapted from the Association for Coaching’s definition of personal coaching: “A collaborative solution-focused, results-orientated and systematic process in which the coach facilitates the enhancement of work performance, life experience, self-directed learning and personal growth of the coachee.”

The author is the founder of a business which has a mixed team of executive coaches and coaching psychologists. Because not all of the coaching team are coaching psychologists we use the AC definition with coachees and clients (the HR professionals/business leaders who contract their services) rather than the BPS DoCP definition of coaching psychology.

 

Interview Questions

Participants will be asked to share their reflections on comeback coaching in a semi-structured interview with the author. Questions will be sent to participants ahead of the interviews. Sample questions:

• Thinking back to the coaching time you had with [name of coach], what were the main effects of the coaching?
• Thinking back to the coaching time you had with [name of coach], what effects have stayed with you over time? OR what learnings have stayed with you over time? OR what effects have sustained over time?
• Thinking specifically about your wellbeing, what effects on your wellbeing, if any, did coaching have?
• BUILD Q: To what extent have those effects sustained over time?
• Thinking back to your coaching experience with [name of coach] is there anything you wish you had discussed or worked on with [name of coach] that you didn’t or didn’t do, to the extent that you think, with hindsight, would have been useful?
• What could you and [name of coach] have talked about back then – that you didn’t talk about or didn’t talk about to the extent that with hindsight it could have been useful to – that would have prepared for what is going on in your career right now?
• Trying to put yourself back into that moment, if your coach had brought that to your attention, do you think it’s something you could have meaningfully or usefully talked about that then?
• What changes to the coaching programme, if any, could have made it more beneficial to you?
• What positive effects, if any, do you think you having that coaching had on your colleagues at [name of organisation] or the wider organisation?
• Is there anything else you would like to say about your experience of comeback coaching?

Stanford University economics professor Nicholas Bloom thinks remote working is so relevant to today’s knowledge workers he’s co-organising a two-day remote work conference this autumn. He’s the researcher who found working from home led to a 13% uplift in performance among call centre staff at the 16,000-employee, NASDAQ-listed Chinese travel agency, CTrip¹.

Working from home is of particular significance to parents and specifically mothers. It’s my contention that if you want more women in senior roles and a smaller or non-existent gender pay gap you need to offer unlimited work from home and encourage male leaders to talk about housework. I haven’t checked but I’m sure Professor Bloom would agree.

Here are the questions I’m answering in this piece

What factors enable women to stay in full time work when they have a young family?
How does WFH compare to a pay increase as a lever for attracting and retaining employees?
Why do people want to work from home?
Why do female employees with young families want to work from home?
How much more unpaid labour are women doing than men?
What’s the story with male leaders talking about housework at work?
Why is Shared Parental Leave relevant to the gender pay gap?
How does WFH contribute to a narrower pay gap?

 

 

What factors enable women to stay in full time work when they have a young family?

We polled people in our Instagram community @comebackcommuk about whether they worked full time or part time and were surprised to learn a higher proportion were full time than we expected. Through a series of DMs with people who responded to the poll, we discovered four key things that seem to enable women to stay in full time work when they have a young family:

1. An employer who is supportive of working from home.
2. An employer who is supportive of compressed hours.
3. Wanting to work full time and enjoying your job.
4. A supportive partner who shares the load fairly at home.

The nitty gritty of how six mothers make full time work work with a young family is explored in episode 62 of our podcast, COMEBACK COACH. It’s the podcast recommended by HR leaders for people returning to work after maternity and other work breaks.

 

 

 

 

How does WFH compare to a pay increase as a lever for attracting and retaining employees?

A survey of over 1000 professionals globally in October 2022 and found 63% would “absolutely” look for a new job if they couldn’t continue to work remotely.

This high willingness of professionals to leave their current job for one with remote work shows just how important the freedom to choose where we works is. The pandemic showed us another way of working that helps us blend the totality of our lives and we’re keen to keep it.

The same survey revealed the top factors professionals state they use to evaluate job opportunities and remote working came top:

• Remote work options (84%)
• Salary (81%)
• Work-life balance (79%)

A separate survey in the US 2022 of 4000 people found 63% would prefer better “work-life balance” than higher pay. Specifically, 87% of respondents stated that a remote or hybrid job would or already has improved their work-life balance and 57% stated they would look for a new job if they couldn’t continue to work remotely.

Only 3% of employees want to be in the office 100% of the time (that’s a lot of disgruntled employees at Goldman Sachs) and 65% prefer a 100% remote work arrangement.

Why do people want to work from home?

• To be more productive by having control over their physical environment – sound levels, lighting, temperature, what they wear, the comfort of their chair.

• To be more productive by potentially working asynchronously when you’re working on solo execution stuff – that is, when you’re not collaborating with someone else being able to get the work done when it suits you. This might be making a 6am start on something cognitively complex when you’re fresh and then breakfast and an hour of lifting weights 9-10.30am.

• Cost savings on the commute – no station parking, no costly train.

• Stress-savings on the uncertainty of the commute – no frustration caused by road traffic, cancelled or late running trains, not being able to get a seat and therefore not be able to do the work on your laptop you thought you were going to plough through.

• Ploughing the time otherwise spent on a commute into something that benefits the individual and their organisation such as exercise, making an earlier start on prepping for a meeting or a continuing professional development activity.

• Mental health – in episode 59 of COMEBACK COACH we heard from UX designer, Elena Gorman, how working from home avoids the stress of having to mask how she’s really feeling to colleagues when she’s having a bad mental health day.

• To keep on top of life admin that would otherwise eat into precious downtime at the weekends.

Why do female employees with young families want to work from home?

For all the reasons above and as Caoimhe describes in the video snippet from episode 62 of COMEBACK COACH, to be able to jigsaw piece all the small but significant extra tasks and responsibilities that go with being a parent as well as an adult with a job. Such as:

• Sterilising milk bottles.
• Putting away toddler toys.
• Hanging out the load of “I wet the bed again” laundry.
• Steaming and mashing sweet potato to freeze in weaning pots.
• Putting poo-stained clothes to soak before popping them in the wash.
• Calling the GP to organise vaccinations (whilst unstacking the dishwasher).

Those gaps between meetings – when research shows you need to give your mind a break with something cognitively undemanding if you are to maintain your performance over the day – are perfect opportunities for completing these tasks. If they’re left until the end of a difficult day after a tiresome commute and with children round your ankles who don’t want to go to bed it’s all too easy to feel completely overwhelmed and say “I can’t do this anymore.”

It’s by being able to keep on top of this huge domestic load that mothers with young children can keep working full time in complex, cognitively demanding senior professional roles. My guess is that having a line manager who trusts you and is supportive of working from home reduces the frequency of “giving it all up” fantasies.

Working from home also provides opportunity for extra contact with children because there’s no commute. This increased time together creates good feelings, reduces guilt and the lack of travel time means the morning is less likely to be frantic and involve cross words (which leads to be more performance-inhibiting guilty feelings as you replay what you said to your five year old as you walk home from the school run).

And then there’s the ability to snatch a brief power nap when required. This dose of rest – which most mothers I know don’t do for fear of being literally caught sleeping on the job – is just what sleep-deprived parents need to be able to function properly and maintain sound professional judgement. Until there are sleep pods in offices and using them is not taboo, working from home gives the greatest chance of getting a rest.

How much more unpaid labour are women doing than men?

Women do 60% more unpaid domestic labour than men and unpaid labour has a worse effect on women’s mental health than men².

In addition and somewhat surprisingly, research by the University of Bath involving data from 6,000 heterosexual couples found that the more women earn in comparison to their partners, the more housework they do. Dr Joanna Syrda of the University’s School of Management who carried out the research explains it as follows:

“It might indicate that traditional gender identity norms – the notion of the ‘male breadwinner’ and its association with masculinity – are so entrenched that couples may try to compensate for a situation where wives earn more than their husbands. I’m interested to find the effect was stronger in married couples than in unmarried cohabiting parents.”

If women are going to stay in the workforce full time once they have children, social norms need to change and there has to be a recalibration of how things work at home. Mothers who work full time should not be carrying the huge and unequal load at home compared to their partners. It has health implications, it causes marital resentment and there’s an implication for what our children they think is normal for men and women to do.

In my book “Mothers Work!” I offer the reader an important question to put to their partner or spouse as they, the reader, returns to work: “Now that we are about to become a dual earning family, how are we going to share the load?” This is something I reiterate in episode 40: 7 questions for a smooth and successful return to work from maternity leave and other work breaks.

What’s the story with male leaders talking about housework at work?

Even the most committed business leaders to gender equality in the workplace can’t tell their male employees to do more housework. It’s an overreach. But you can talk about the domestic duties you do at home; the ways in which you share the mental load; actively care for your children and the ways in which you support your partner’s career. If you’re not doing these things, when will you start? By talking about what you do at home with other men in your organisation, you signal that that’s what men in positions of professional power do. You normalise senior men being active at home.

Why is Shared Parental Leave relevant to the gender pay gap?

On this note, I recently had a conversation with Times journalist and The Equal Parent author Paul Morgan-Bentley and his husband Robin about parental equality. They had their son Solly through surrogacy and they each took exactly the same number of days shared parental leave. Shared Parental Leave is a significant lever for closing the gender pay gap because it begins to level the playing field between men and women when they become parents (it also helps close the gender pensions gap). It reduces the likelihood of maternity discrimination too because if both genders are equally likely to take leave there’s no advantage in employing a man of a certain age instead of a woman.

As an aside, my personal view is that Shared Parental Leave was a doomed Government policy and fathers need a use-it-or-lose-it portion of parental leave equal to that of mothers. But that’s another story I’ve written elsewhere.

How does WFH contribute to a narrower gender pay gap?

In many organisations with a gender pay gap in favour of men, the problem is due to the far greater numbers of men in the highest paid jobs. Keeping women in full time work and supporting their career aspirations when they become mothers (and most women do become mothers so it’s vital we recognise this) is vital. Only in high trust environments where women can work from home – for all the reasons described above – without penalty and where male colleagues are taking Shared Parental Leave and sharing the load at home will women stay and make those tops jobs.

Your other option is simply to pay mothers for their unpaid labour at home.

References and Resources

¹Call centre employees who volunteered to WFH were randomly assigned to work from home or in the office for 9 months. Home working led to a 13% performance increase, of which about 9% was from working more minutes per shift (fewer breaks and sick-days) and 4% from more calls per minute (attributed to a quieter working environment). Home workers also reported improved work satisfaction and experienced less turnover, but their promotion rate conditional on performance fell. Due to the success of the experiment, CTrip rolled-out the option to WFH to the whole firm and allowed the experimental employees to re-select between the home or office. Interestingly, over half of them switched, which led to the gains from WFH almost doubling to 22%. This highlights the benefits of learning and selection effects when adopting modern management practices like WFH.

²A review published in The Lancet Public Health by a team from the university of Melbourne explored the impact of unpaid labour on mental health. As part of their review they looked at 9 studies that specifically explored housework as a form of unpaid labour, and of these, six reported a relationship between increased housework and poor mental health in women. For men, only three of the studies found a link for increased housework and poorer mental health. The team point out in their paper that the difference might be due to men receiving praise for doing things like childcare and housework whereas women do not. They concluded that policies need to be in place to better spread the division of labour between mothers and fathers such as more equal parental leave, flexible working arrangements and promotion of paternal involvement in childcare.

What can two gay dads teach fathers about being a parent? Quite a lot actually.

That was the headline in The Times on Saturday 25/2/23 about Paul & Robin Morgan-Bentley, a husband and husband duo who had their son Solly via surrogacy. Paul is the author of a new book The Equal Parent (digested below) and you can listen to Jessica’s conversation with Paul & Robin on episode 58 of our podcast COMEBACK COACH. Join us Tuesday 28th March 2023 8-8.45pm for our live online Q&A with Paul.

Comeback Coach podcast – ep. 58

Paul and Robin both went through their own work comebacks after taking many months of Shared Parental Leave after having their son Solley through surrogacy.

We talk about:

• • their surrogacy journey
  • why they took exactly equal amounts of Shared Parental Leave
  • how they each prepared to return to work
  • how they share the load at home
  • why new mothers have it so hard on maternity leave and returning to work
  • the uncommon practice things they do to that enables them to have gratifying careers and a happy home life.

Paul & Robin’s 3 pieces of advice (from episode 58)

• You don’t need to hide work from your children.
• It’s good for children to experience parents doing things differently.
• If we want equality in dual earing households both parents must take leave when they become parents – and independent leave (partners having leave at different times rather than together) is the best teacher of all.

The Equal Parent

Paul’s new book, The Equal Parent, is a must if you:

• Chair an employee resource group connected to family, caring responsibility or gender balance.
• Head an Inclusion or Culture team.
• Want societal change around sharing the load of parenthood.

TLDR – The Equal Parent Digested

When our founder, coaching psychologist, Jessica Chivers reads non fiction she underline copiously and write notes about key points/pages in the front cover for ease of reference months/years later. Here are her key page references for The Equal Parent:

• p.14 Benefits accrued when fathers have skin to skin contact with their newborns
• p.25 The ideal design of a hospital birth room.
• p.46 Mothers who sleep train their babies have lower levels of PND.
• p.50 Men should do night shifts when at work and partners are on maternity leave.
• p.84 Comparison of cost of childcare in other countries.
• p.99 Estonia has best education system in Europe and least costly childcare to parents.
• p.102 Surrogacy explained
• p.141 The more women earn in comparison to their partners, the more housework they do (University of Bath, data from 6K heterosexual couples).
• p.142 Pandemic parenting: research by Queen Mary University London + LSE using surveys (n = 1424) and diaries (c 70) found mothers doing much more than fathers.
• p.144 Anna Machin (academic) independent period of leave when baby born is crucial for sexual equality.
• p.146 Prof Michael Lamb: extensive research established that both sexes have capacity to be good parents. Key is men actively caring for children.
• p.151 Fathers are key to child’s mental health in adolescence onwards due to their ‘rough and tumble’ play style and likely to push child physically (no reason mothers can’t do this too).
• p.159 UK Health Visitor service system only has space to record one parent’s data (thereby perpetuating role model stereotypes and unequal responsibility of child).
• p.166  Fatherhood Institute research June 2022 “Bringing Home Baby” finds .”…NHS maternity, health visiting and other family services are failing babies by ignoring their fathers during the first postnatal year.”
• p.168 Even dads in Sweden and Norway feel excluded from health appointments  of kids despite them being progressive countries in terms of parental leave.
• p.192 New York University researchers find mothers underestimate baby daughters’ physical abilities (the ramp test age 11 months).
• p.193 Age 6 appears to be when girls switch to seeing themselves less favourably than boys see themselves.
• p.203-211 Malala Yousafzai and father’s potted history of gender activism
• p.222 Children appear to benefit most from having three secure relationships (kibbutzim research).

Our founder Jessica Chivers was delighted to contribute* to “Don’t Fix Women” and join Joy Burnford at the launch at the London Stock Exchange.

When JC reads non-fiction she’s in the habit of marking up key page references in the front cover for ease of reference when she returns to it weeks/months/years down the line).

See below for what she marked from Don’t Fix Women.

P5 – PACE framework: Passion, Accountability, Curiosity, Empathy.
P33 – Male job-share story at Aviva.
P50 Net-Walking at Wickes (reminiscent of our awe-walking idea)
P58 – Gender Allies Matrix.
P62 – SPACES model.
P73 Benefits of reverse mentoring at Royal Bank of Canada.
P86 – GSK coaching experiment with female leaders.
P100 – Menopause key facts inc. running men-only info events. Channel 4 publicly available policy for download. Timpsons pay for HRT prescriptions.
P127 – 90% fertility patients experience depression.
P151 benefits of fathers who care.
P168 – Burnout is X2 more likely in women.
P187 – Presentation confidence – give people time to practice.

 

*Jessica’s contribution to the book was around how best to help colleagues have a confident return from maternity leave before they go:

Suggest recording a video message: Jessica Chivers, CEO, The Talent Keeper Specialists and author of Mothers Work!, encourages women to record a video message to themselves on their phone before they go on maternity leave, which can cover what they’re most proud of, key achievements and strengths. Then when women return to work, they can play it back to themselves as a reminder of their ‘professional self’ and achievements before leaving. 

1:1 comeback coaching – HR perspectives

Watch the 1 minute film about our work with asset management firm, GAM and ITV. We coach colleagues returning from maternity, Shared Parental Leave, sick leave and other work breaks. HRD Debbie Dalzell and Head of Wellbeing & Development at ITV, Kirsty Duncan explain why.