It’s High Time We Normalise Career Breaks

REBOOT: How to Manage Career Breaks and Return with Greater Success by Issac John shares the message that no matter the odds you are up against, a career break is always temporary, and, in many cases, it can even prove to be life-changing. It’s High Time We Normalise Career Breaks. An excerpt:

There’s absolutely no right or wrong time to take a parental break, but I’d like to invoke the story of one of our protagonists as an example of what could go wrong.

Megha Tata was a fast-rising professional in a company when she had a baby. At that point of time, she was heading sales for all of India. She goes in for a maternity break for three months. But when she’s back, an unpleasant surprise awaits her.

Megha is given a smaller regional role, while the national sales head role has gone to someone else. While she knows that an injustice has been meted out to her, she swallows her pride and works doubly hard to regain the position that should’ve been her own. She gets there in another eight to nine months.

‘In those days, it was unthinkable that I could even raise my voice against the management that was largely a big boys club.’ I ask her what she would do differently today.

Megha adds, ‘Unfortunately, I normalized the situation back then as a natural outcome of my being away from work. After all, I was the one making a comeback, so my defences were low. It didn’t occur to me to probe the HR and my manager more deeply about that decision. Looking back, I should’ve questioned them about the thinking behind it. I would encourage younger women today to question these things and push back, if necessary with appropriate escalations at work’.

That was decades ago. Twenty two years later, things have surely changed.

Rashi Kakkar, an associate at McKinsey, has some practical advice for mothers of today. ‘Before I began my maternity break, I had a conversation with my People Development Manager. We discussed specifically what my transition going in and out of my maternity break would mean for my subsequent growth at the firm.’ Having this kind of a clear and candid conversation before you go on your maternity break will help avert any potential unpleasant surprises once you’re back at the workplace. In bluechip MNCs that focus on diversity and inclusiveness, this kind of a conversation would even be welcome, but what about Indian companies that still have a long way to go? Gowri Satyamoorthy Kapre, the founder of a healthy snack start-up (WhyFryy), who has recently gone back to a full-time role
as the CMO of a prominent company, offers another perspective. Owing to health issues, she stopped working early into her second pregnancy and had to quit her job. Seeking re-entry into the workforce while needing to balance the care of two young children in a nuclear family system, she had a hard time reconciling the conflicting demands of a fulfilling career and running a home.

She tried to get around by offering her services as a “part-time employee”, in order to ensure that no eye-brows were raised if she refused a meeting beyond 4pm. ‘In retrospect, that was the worst thing I could have done. I ended up working near, if not completely, full-time, at half the salary! I now realize that the responsibilities of the role should determine the salary commanded and I needlessly short-changed myself, not only in the immediate term, but for longer, as future salaries get benchmarked to past ones. I also hurt my personal end-goal further by working extra-hard to ensure that my “part-time” status did not ever get questioned.’

Those were early years and there were not that many women in senior positions. So there were no role models and no policies in
place to assist people returning after a break. This was 12 years ago, and Gowri feels that a lot has changed, and definitely for the better.
‘A couple of factors have accelerated this change. The biggest one is the growth of Social media, which has given a voice to every constituency and driven the pace at which HR policies have been modified to accommodate for all kinds of flexibility. The second is the flood of women entering the workforce and doing a great job. Companies have had to start walking the talk on diversity. Some of the other drivers are an improvement in child care facilities, recognition of work-life balance and the growth of the software industry, which works comfortably with a hybrid online-offline model, not requiring all employees to report every day to work.

Once that happened, it was only a matter of time before other sectors were forced to follow with flexible work policies. And if anyone still had any doubts, the pandemic drove the last of them away.’

Avdesh Mittal, Managing Director, Digital Practice APAC at Korn Ferry, paints a more positive picture. He has routinely dealt with and placed women returning after a maternity leave. ‘If there’s one break that raises the least eyebrows, it’s a maternity break. There is increased acceptance among mature companies to let mothers rejoin the workforce at the same or better level than that at which they took a break.’

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I ask Avdesh if the situation is any different for fathers. After all, aren’t they entitled to more than their two to three weeks of paternity break to share the work with the mothers? ‘Increasingly, that’s changing too, though it will take some time for mainstream corporate India to accept six months of paternity leave.’

A quick glance at this topic reveals new trends coming into play. P&G recently announced an eight-week paternity leave for would be fathers. Another interesting development is that LinkedIn has recently announced that ‘Stay at Home Mom’ is a valid profession that women could choose in their profile. This is a significant breakthrough, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. The next time you need to update your profile on LinkedIn because of a break related to childbirth, you can proudly wear those months or years on your LinkedIn sleeve. What’s more, fathers can do so too.

Excerpted with permission from REBOOT: How to Manage Career Breaks and Return with Greater Success by Issac John published by HarperCollins.

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