Parental maternity leave sounds so scary even as I’m typing this post. Why? Because as an entrepreneur, you’re essentially “leaving” your business behind and hoping for the best when you return! Luckily, this isn’t the case for me. I have an amazing women-led team who is handling work while I’m out navigating life with a new baby. In this post, I’ll share four ways I’m preparing my business for maternity leave success.
What is parental maternity leave?
Maternity leave is the duration of time a pregnant individual can expect to be away from work as they navigate planning for a baby, the duration of time for labor & delivery, recovery time and time to bond with family.
If you have a partner, they may have something called paternity leave.
In corporate world, the duration of your maternity leave may depend on what state you currently live in and what your company policy is. I believe the average paternity leave right now is around 2 weeks of paid time off.
This brings me into my next point – during maternity leave, you should be getting paid time off. Again, this duration is dependent on your company and/or the state you live in.
How long is maternity leave?
I’m diving right in to the most common question I’ve been asked when sharing about my upcoming leave. “How long will you be out?”
I am planning to take the standard maternity leave duration here in North Carolina, which is 12 weeks. However, because my leave is running through the peak holiday season with Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Year, I’m planning to return on the first Monday of January.
The great thing about being an entrepreneur is being able to dictate how long your leave is. For me being a first time mom, I’m really unsure how long I’ll actually need in my leave. I might be an individual who wants to return after a month of leave. Or – maybe I’m someone who feels the 12 week duration is too short. Either way, I’m very grateful I’m able to navigate this as the CEO of my company.
If you are working a corporate job, I do believe your maternity leave is based on company policy and the state of residency.
How to prepare for maternity leave at work
Whether you are in entrepreneurship or in the corporate space, how you prepare for your maternity leave may look different. As a corporate worker, maybe you begin training an individual to take over your projects while you are out. Or, maybe there’s no planning required and you can just exit smoothly!
I can only speak to my experience and what I am doing to prepare for my maternity leave as the owner of an agency. In this post, I’ll be covering these main four things:
- Crafting my maternity plan
- Closing out projects
- Establishing a communication schedule with team
- Notifying clients and/or prospective clients of operations
Parental Maternity Leave Prep #1: Crafting my maternity plan
The first thing I did as I really began preparing for parental maternity leave was crafting a maternity plan. Now, a maternity plan will look completely different for each person based on your preferences, type of work and duration. So, keep that in mind 🤗
My maternity plan covered a few of the important areas of my business that I wanted to ensure were taken care of:
- New client booking
- Communication
- Discovery call
- Current/past clients
- Monthly clients
- Weekly newsletter
- My responsibilities
Once I determined my important areas, I started fleshing out the details of how I wanted each of these handled. For example – will we be accepting new clients while I’m out? How will discovery calls be handled? Who’s responsibility is the weekly newsletter?
I then started tagging team members and assigning different roles based on my preferences in my maternity plan.
Parental Maternity Leave Prep #2: Closing out projects
I simply cannot start my maternity leave without closing out existing projects. So, this looks like a lot of time-management and time-crunching as I’m two weeks out from leave.
I am also not assigning myself any new client work and I’m working hard to finish out any tasks that I may have before my leave begins.
If in any event that I’m unable to close out a project, I’ll communicate to my team who or what needs to happen to transfer a project to another team member. This is super important to taking a leave because you don’t want to “pause” a project until you come back.
Maternity Prep #3: Establishing a communication schedule with my team
A large part of my maternity plan was establishing a communication schedule with my team. For example, when can they expect to hear from me? Will they be hearing from me at all? How will they hear from me?
More particularly – if I need to be reached out to because of a client emergency, where can someone reach me? Because candidly, I plan to remove/limit emails and slacks to harbor myself from checking them constantly.
For me – I will be attentive via email at least once a week. My team will have my cell number for anything pressing, and I’ll be hopping into slack once a week as well.
Establishing a communication schedule will ensure that every member of your team is crystal clear on how to reach you if they really need to!
Maternity Leave Prep #4: Notifying clients and/or prospective clients of operations
Last but definitely not least is being completely open with your clients on how things will operate during your parental maternity leave.
Our team started communicating with clients a few months prior to my leave on how things will be handled once I’m out. I also went on our Instagram and chatted about this briefly while saving it to a highlight. This is vital to ensure your clients don’t feel left in the dark or confused on why they may not see your name pop up throughout the project.
For our team – we will have an auto responder via email with clear instructions on who to contact in regards to what project.
Conclusion
Being a first time mom, this is my first maternity leave that I’m planning for. I am well-prepared for things to go wrong or things to change in regard to my plan. That’s okay!
I fully believe that every entrepreneur should have a well-thought out plan to at least work off of and send to your team so that everyone is fully aware of what’s going on as you are out.
Maybe you’ll be someone who doesn’t really need much of a leave and can return to work fairly quickly – great! Either way, planning is the key part of keeping your team organized and your clients happy 🚀
