Preparing for Parental Leave
Maximize your time off work by delegating, educating, and communicating with your team.
I recently returned to work after enjoying twelve precious weeks of maternity leave. The first few months of my baby’s life went by way too quickly, but I am grateful to have a job to return to, and happy to be back in the virtual office. As I sort through three months of emails and prioritize Q4 projects, I find myself glad that I took time before my baby’s arrival to make sure my work team was prepared for my absence.
One of the nice things about parental leave, especially compared with other occasions to miss work such as illness or bereavement, is being able to plan in advance. I didn’t know the exact day when my baby would arrive and my leave would begin, but I knew it would be no later than the end of July. To err on the side of being too prepared rather than surprised—especially after a coworker’s baby arrived four weeks before the due date—my internal deadline to be ready for handoff was the end of June. By Independence Day, I was feeling confident that my team would be able to cover for me while I was out. It worked out that spending the spring preparing for my summer off ended up easing my transition back to work this fall.
If you’re a manager, team leader, project point-person, or subject matter expert with an upcoming extended leave, there are a few simple ways you can set up your team for success during your absence. These ideas are especially relevant in a smaller organization where you might be the only person who does what you do. To make work life easier for everyone, including your future post-leave self, it’s worth taking the time to delegate, educate, and communicate with your team.
Delegate
The first step in planning for a leave of absence is identifying the work that needs to be done. It helps to make a few lists: one of all your day-to-day job responsibilities and current projects, and then if you have direct reports, make a separate list of anything out of the ordinary that you would like them to do while you’re out.
Looking at your own list, cross off anything that doesn’t actually need to be done. Your side projects or deep-dive research will probably be waiting for you when you get back. For anything left on the “important” list, think through (possibly in a brainstorm session with your direct reports or your leadership team) who could temporarily cover your responsibilities. Make sure that there is at least one name next to every must-do task or essential project.
Resource planning is an important step in delegation: Does your team have the capacity (Time? Aptitude? Attitude?) to cover for you, or will they need to hire a contractor to help cover some of the department’s work? If you’re responsible for decision-making, think about who will make the call while you’re gone. (Your manager? The team lead? Maybe you right now so that the decision is already made before the question is asked?)
Your LOA can be a great opportunity to let a high-achieving individual contributor step into a leadership role. And with some thoughtful delegation, teaching others how to cover your work can increase the cross-functional skills on your team.
Educate
Once you have figured out what the work is and who will do it, it’s time to identify and address any gaps in knowledge or skills. When I realized that I was the only person at the company aware of the nuances of how to post a properly formatted job listing, or that I was the only remaining admin able to approve benefits enrollments, I prioritized these areas for training my team.
With all the research available on adult learning, the topic of team training could be a post of its own, so we will cover just a few ideas here. What works best for you will depend on the type of training needed and on the individuals you’re teaching. One of the best uses of your time is to document processes, ideally in your organization’s online knowledge base or a shared company drive. For software skills, you can add screenshots to help your learners confirm they are landing on the right page or clicking the correct box. (Side note: Learning the keyboard shortcut for copying a screenshot to the clipboard on my Macbook was a game-changer for me. Command + shift + fn + 4 = screenshots pasted in seconds!) My team appreciated having this step-by-step guide to follow along while I demonstrated, and it also served as a resource to refer to later. In fact, accessible documentation is a gift to your organization that often impacts more than just your leave of absence. If you get promoted out of your role, or leave the company, or need to train a new hire, or have a family emergency and have to miss work, the time you have invested in documentation will pay off.
To supplement the how-to-do-my-job playbook, I like to use the magic of screenshare to walk through processes together. I invited my direct reports to a video call and showed them some of the more complicated tasks, narrating each step while they followed along in the documentation. Next, I let my team members go through the process themselves while I watched on video, commenting as needed. Most of my coworkers felt that actually doing the action themselves was the most effective way for them to learn and remember. For more strategic items, I documented some of my thought process (“Here are some things we think about when selecting an interview panel…”) and added a quick meeting to discuss it with my team and answer their questions. Whether you’re working remotely or in-person, you can use these skills of documenting, demonstrating, and shadowing to pass on whatever knowledge others will need to carry on without you.
Communicate
Successful communication will look different for different roles, different work environments, and different individuals. Many new parents are offline completely for the duration of their leave, and that’s completely valid; the birth or adoption of a child is a special and demanding time of life with priorities that trump checking office emails. Like vacation time, as a benefit of employment, parental leave is most valuable when employees are truly given freedom to be off work completely. Many companies actually freezes employee accounts during parental leave or FMLA so that there is no possibility of logging in during that time. And if you’re a non-exempt employee who is paid by the hour, or you’re taking unpaid leave of any kind, you are definitely not obligated to work during your scheduled time off.
But if, like me, you have a little FOMO on department decisions, or a little drive for make sure no important requests are ignored by your out-of-office autoresponder, or a little time to low-key scroll through Slack with a newborn asleep on your lap, there are ways to communicate that won’t monopolize your baby-bonding time.
One working mother of two whom I respect told me that she used a Google doc to keep in touch with her direct reports during maternity leave, and this idea was perfect for me since my team knows, despite having access to Microsoft Word at an organizational level, that I am a committed user of the Google Workspace. A Google doc (or yes, a shared Word doc) allows asynchronous communication free of distracting alerts (side note: be sure to snooze your Slack notifications or delete the app completely), and doubles as a record of what decisions were made and projects were completed during your leave period.
Using a separate document for each of my direct reports, I included a quick template list dated for each week I was gone that had space for Highlights & Accomplishments, Challenges, Questions, Notes, and Action Items. If my reports had something to share for any of the categories that week, they filled it in. If not, they left it blank; the idea was to create a communication channel, not to assign homework. They knew they could text me with anything pressing, but the shared document was perfect for recording wins and jotting notes about low-priority issues.
When it comes to communicating with others in or outside of your organization, the key is to find what works for you and set appropriate expectations with your team. Instead of committing to a calendar meeting at a set time, I was able to make an occasional work call while my newborn was napping. When I didn’t want to miss out on a product demo with a new software vendor, I joined the web session with my camera and microphone off so that my little one’s grunty baby sounds wouldn’t distract anyone else.
Really, communication is a fitting one-word summary for this post.
Communicate about what needs to be done. Communicate about how to do the work effectively and excellently. Communicate about your availability and your expectations. Tell others how they can best communicate with you during your leave.
And then, focus on enjoying your new child. (Or your vacation. Or your couch. Whatever the reason for your leave, don’t get so caught up in work that you lose it.) Time off goes by quickly, and before you know it, your team will be welcoming you back to work.
- MJ
Life of You
How have you set your team up for success while you’re out of the office? What have your co-workers done to prepare that helped you succeed in their absence?