What if we could celebrate every pregnancy announcement like we do a promotion?
Testimonials from 20 mothers or mothers-to-be on their experiences of motherhood
Twenty women. That's how many people we talked to to put together this feature on motherhood. Twenty stories and over thirty pregnancies later, we have to admit that we're far from always welcoming parenthood with joy and celebration when it comes to the workplace. Yet women have always given birth. Over time, we could have improved and created tools, systems and processes so that all employees, men and women alike, could feel good every day, no matter what they're going through.
These testimonials are not all bad news! Fear not. In fact, we'd like to share with you some of our best practices, inspirations and tips for improving the employee experience of parenthood at your company.
Twenty simple encounters. Twenty beautiful souls who shared their vulnerability and their desire for change.
Thank you for letting me carry your voice. To expose. For shedding light. To talk about things we often keep to ourselves, out of fear, lack of confidence, fear of repercussions.
Shared responsibility
Many important moments can be supported and supervised by the employer. In fact, this is what is planned in an employee career path. By life event, we mean a loss, an illness, support for a caregiver, a promotion, a return to school, depression, the purchase of a new home, the arrival of a new child...
Maternity leave is the responsibility of both employee and employer. That's right. We came to this conclusion in a discussion with expert Amélie Mongrain. The employee has a lot to do with his or her destiny. It also enables them to make more informed choices about their professional future. As for the employer, he or she should act as a support in this great transition, in this great period of change.
Humanizing the process
A pregnancy announcement is a celebration. Under no circumstances is it acceptable to call the whole thing into question. Tell yourself that this isn't goodbye, it's an employee who will return to your organization if you're kind to her through this big change. Most of the women who testified made the announcement to their manager before the three-month mark. It's easier to manage the schedule of medical appointments this way, and to explain some of the unpleasant symptoms that prevent us from being at our best. Women report having less difficulty announcing their pregnancy in female workplaces. There's more understanding. If you have female employees between the ages of 20 and 45, expect pregnancy announcements. It's a fact of life.
“I wanted to announce it so quickly so as not to cast doubt on the reasons behind the blocked time slots in my schedule that my boss asked me if I was happy with my pregnancy. I was so stressed.”
“I was afraid to announce my pregnancy and no longer be seen as an asset to the company.”
“I questioned whether I was announcing my pregnancy because I’d been on the job less than three months. The climate was so difficult.”
“I was working in a masculine environment where they wanted to keep women on the job at all costs. However, I was used to the maximum of my skills and for as long as possible before I left. I had to resort to legal recourse to get off work. The women who worked in the organization knew that they had to keep their pregnancy secret for as long as possible.”
“I interviewed for a job early in my pregnancy. I chose to announce it at the very end of the meeting, for the sake of transparency since the employer operates on a mandate basis. Luckily, I was hired for the long term and that wasn’t a problem.”
“I had to change jobs when I was 4 months pregnant. For most employers this didn’t seem to be a problem, but some never gave me any news.”
“It’s okay to change jobs when you’re pregnant, but not when you’re an executive. I had to give up some big jobs. If I’d been a man, I’d never have had to talk about my desire to have children. It’s hard to be an ambitious woman.”
“I was demoted when I announced my fertility process to my new manager. All because I had had my hormones turned up because of the process. I lost over $20K in annual salary because, according to him, I was no longer fit to do my job.”
“My boyfriend also felt guilty about the announcement of a leave of absence in a very masculine environment. He had been in the job for 1 year and felt the need to justify himself. In the end, it was super well received.”
If you've never been through this as an employer. It's okay to make a mistake. Just be transparent with the employee who announces her pregnancy. Create the tools as you go along. Try something, you'll be more prepared for the second announcement that follows.
Employee responsibilities:
Communicate the big announcement as soon as you feel comfortable in order to prepare the ground, but above all to feel comfortable at work if you have symptoms on a daily basis, for example, or to attend your medical appointments without justifying yourself.
What the organization can do to help
Celebrate leave announcements instead of seeing them as an additional burden. Create a genuine ritual for good news in the workplace.
Offer flexibility and openness regarding medical appointments. On average, a mother-to-be will have one medical follow-up a month, in addition to having to attend growth ultrasounds and several blood tests. These appointments are rarely at times chosen by the mother-to-be. Being flexible alleviates this organizational headache.
Understand that the employee is going through a lot of change, and try to make announcements gently or with due care.
It's important to prepare for a transition or a maternity leave replacement.
Offering a leave of absence for assisted reproduction would give a break to mothers undergoing numerous fertility treatments.
Offer shared support programs through your insurance programs, enabling your employees to submit applications for life projects not covered by insurance, such as fertility programs.
Limiting grey areas
When we talk about mental workload, it's impossible not to mention parity. It's especially in this respect that women feel neglected, carrying a heavy burden on their shoulders.
Motherhood brings its own set of questions, especially if it's your first pregnancy. The financial burden, the decisions to be made regarding leave, the paperwork to be completed, the medical follow-up, the foods not to eat, stress management and so much more. What we notice is how little assistance there is in relation to parenthood, apart from what we learn in the medical clinic. In the workplace, it's very rare to be accompanied when it comes to RQAP and parental benefits, to have easy access to resources that make you feel well supported, well surrounded. Having to dig for answers to these questions is very time-consuming.
The mental burden of motherhood and the baby to come is added to the mental burden of work and the other children who may be waiting for us at home. All this means that the mother-to-be starts to overflow. It's important to understand that she now has a new person to take care of. Lightening the mental load means giving your employee a break and reducing the risk of mistakes or oversights at work. That's why we prefer a gradual departure and a gradual return to work. Because it's a lot to take in all at once. We want to take a gentle approach to change.
“I was laid off a week before my return to work. It was a very scary time. If it hadn’t been for my partner, I don’t know what I would have done.”
“They took advantage of my leave to cut my job. So I had to look elsewhere and reorient myself. ”
“Once I was on the job, I found out that my manager hadn’t been told I was pregnant when I was hired. He found out during my onboarding.”
“I received a lot of project updates during my parental leave, which gave me a lot of anxiety. It didn’t make me want to go back.”
If you're planning to make major changes, or reorganize your staff, keep in mind people on long-term leave. Following maternity leave, mothers are not eligible for unemployment benefits under the RQAP. This is equivalent to a period of unpaid leave during the post-partum period, which is a pivotal time for some women. If, for example, everyone is working remotely and expectations are changing, allow your employees returning from long-term leave a smooth transition to enable them to adapt.
Employee responsibilities:
Discuss the presence of your partner as a support during pregnancy as well as during leave, to get a real idea of each person's responsibility.
Delegate the search for childcare to your partner, or the purchase of several pieces for the bedroom. Delegate housework and the things that make you uncomfortable with your belly.
Create a calendar with appointments and try to go to them together, so that the mental burden of the next steps doesn't belong to you alone.
Decide on the approximate duration of your leave and think about your departure plan. How many weeks do you want to be off before the baby arrives, etc.?
Think about how involved you want to be during the leave. Do you want the company to contact you? If so, who and how often.
Think about your future with the company, what you'd like to do when you return, and communicate this to your manager or HR team.
What the organization can do to help:
Offer a top-up on the salaries of your employees and their spouses among your group insurance packages or employee benefits.
Offer an administrative support guide so you know what needs to be done for payroll, RQAP, insurance, etc. It's a simple one-pager, but highly relevant to small companies with no HR department.
Introduce the EAP program. You don't know how the parents will experience this pregnancy.
Create a tool and resource guide with services available in your area. (naturopathy, doula, prenatal classes, etc.)
Help with calculations related to maternity leave, so that the mother-to-be can project herself into this new reality.
Highlight the benefits you offer that are related to parenthood and that can support your employee during this period of her life, as well as that of the future baby.
If you're a unionized environment, make sure the employee's rights are clear in this respect.
Indicate who and how the transition will be made for the workload to be handed over. Try not to transfer all the pressure of the transition to the person leaving. Plan a who, what and how.
Involve the mother-to-be in choosing her replacement, if she so wishes. This can help with succession.
If you can afford it, try a transition on return too, so that the replacement can hand over the files properly.
Ask the employee if he or she wishes to remain in contact with the organization during his or her leave, so that you can keep abreast of what's happening and what's not.
Be patient and empathetic with your employee.
If your employees work remotely, don't forget that not seeing your employee's pregnancy progress doesn't means she'll be around longer - she's pregnant beyond what you see on your screen.
Some women gain very little weight when they're pregnant, but don't forget that they are (housework, heavy lifting, standing for long periods, etc.).
If your employee has a tendency to want to stay on top of everything, take away her access so she can live her leave to the full, without pressure.
Show compassion
Under no circumstances is it acceptable to show spite or resentment in the face of pregnancy news. Remember that not all couples have it easy. For some, it's a long process that requires a great deal of time, investment and emotion. Avoid comments that could make parents feel uncomfortable.
It's also a time when women question themselves. She may reduce her workload, or stop it altogether during the leave, while her partner climbs the career ladder. Several women mentioned that they found this gap difficult.
“When I explained my fertility journey to my new manager, he told me that having children wasn’t for everyone. That if I had to try so hard maybe it wasn’t for me.”
“I had to give myself my injections lying on the carpet in the middle of my office. Luckily, I had a closed office.”
“I got shamed for not following a normal return-to-work curve when I had no return onboarding and was working in a hyper-stressful environment.”
“I’m not disabled, I’m pregnant.”
“I felt fully myself again at work when my son was two.”
“She’s a mom, the role is demanding so that’s why she won’t be able to work on the project anymore.”
“I made a mistake at work at the end of my pregnancy and immediately received a disciplinary notice instead of discussing with me the causes behind the mistake. I lacked concentration at work and they kept trying to postpone my departure. ”
The fourth trimester, the famous post-partum period. It's a period we don't talk much about, but one that can be very difficult physically and psychologically for many women. Very few resources exist to support women through this pivotal period. It's at this stage that new parents feel all the external pressure, that they lose themselves as a person, that they sometimes lack sleep. We're not saying it's entirely up to employers to do this, but compassion comes into play here.
Employee responsibilities:
Be attentive to your needs, your reality and name things clearly in order to help your employer lighten your schedule or understand how you feel about returning.
Be gentle. You're not like you used to be. Your priorities have changed. You haven't worked for several months, so you need to get used to this routine.
Ask for help if it's too much. Use the services of your EAP, and accept help from those around you if you can.
What the organization can do to help :
Probe the employee's needs to understand her reality and allow her the support or accommodations she needs to be comfortable in the office.
Allow work from home.
Allow flexible scheduling for more medical follow-ups.
Offer broader benefits to cover certain fertility-related expenses.
Offer psychology services with no time limit accessible in your EAP.
Extend your benefits package to include lactation consultant fees.
Break isolation. If several women in your company are pregnant at the same time, you can put them in touch with each other. Otherwise, don't forget that many new parents don't have a close circle of friends. Check in on them in a caring way during parental leave, if they're up for it. Offering a kit with Facebook groups or prenatal or baby yoga groups would be a great creative way to do this.
