The Maternity Leave Project Plan
A joint resource for managers and employees. One document you fill in together, so nothing about the leave gets decided by accident.
From telling your manager you are pregnant, to 90 days after you are back. Every conversation that needs to happen, in the order it needs to happen, with space for both of you to write down what you agreed.Get the whole thing out of your head and onto one page.
Most maternity leave advice covers the leave. This covers the four stages where careful planning has the most impact on a successful leave period and return to work.
⭐ Before leave. The handover, the dates, the paperwork, and the bit nobody plans for: what happens if the baby comes early. Plus the conversation about which updates you want while you are away and which you really do not.
⭐ During leave. How much contact is the right amount of contact, agreed once and written down, so neither of you is guessing. Your manager knows what to send. You don’t need to worry when things go quiet.
⭐ Prepping for return. Your 90 day re-entry plan, built using your KIT days rather than your own time, and agreed six to eight weeks before you walk back in. This is the section people tell me they wish they had done!
⭐ After return. The 30, 60 and 90 day check-ins that catch the small problems while they are still small, instead of six months later when things are reaching crisis point.
Every section has two columns, yours and your manager's, side by side. You are both looking at the same document, which is the whole point!
You have run projects, managed teams and handled far more complicated things than this.
So why is maternity leave the one thing nobody has given you a process for?
Here is what I see over and over. Two capable people, both meaning well, both making sensible decisions on their own, and nobody writing any of it down. The manager goes quiet because she thinks she is giving space. The employee reads the silence as being forgotten.
None of that is a competence problem. It is a documentation problem, and [XX]% of mothers report a negative experience returning to work largely because of it.
The Maternity Leave Project Plan is the document that fixes it. Four stages and a notes field against every line. You work through it together, you fill it in, and you update it when things change. It takes twenty minutes to start and it stays useful for the next eighteen months.
It is free, and there is a Google Doc version you can both edit if you would rather work that way.
Testimonials
✨
Testimonials ✨
“A couple of weeks ago I sat down with our HR team and re-wrote our parental leave checklist, we used yours and identified the gaps in our current and now have a new framework under review.” - Family ERG Lead, Molson Coors
“One less thing to have to sit down and draw up myself so I can spend more time thinking about what I actually want as part of this plan, than trying to think about the list of topics that I need to discuss with my LM while I frantically wrap up everything to handover before starting mat leave! ” - Head of Go To Market Strategy, Boots
I’m Zoe. I’ve managed maternity leave processes for teams at Amazon, Time Inc. plus smaller agencies in London and New York. I’m also a mum, so I’ve been through it myself and I know which bits of the advice hold up and which don’t.
