The Cost of Getting Maternity Return Wrong and a Business Case for Retaining Female Talent
Updated: 2 days ago
Isabel Theissen founded &BEYOND, a maternity transition consultancy. She helps organizations create more structured, sustainable maternity transitions while guiding women through the personal and professional shifts that accompany motherhood.
As organizations begin planning their 2027 people priorities and budgets, Human Resources (HR) leaders are thinking about many of the same strategic challenges, how to retain experienced talent, strengthen female leadership pipelines, develop capable managers, and protect business continuity.
There is one moment in the employee journey that sits at the intersection of all of these priorities, yet is still too often treated as an administrative process, the return from maternity leave.
For many organizations, maternity leave itself is relatively well defined. There are policies and legal requirements in place. There may be a clear handover process, documentation, and a designated point of contact in HR.
But while an employee is on leave and when they return, the structure often becomes less clear.
And that matters because the return to work is not simply the final step in a period of leave. It is a significant career transition that can influence whether experienced female talent stays, progresses, and continues to see a future within the organization.
The investment is already there
Consider a high-performing woman who has been with your organization for several years. By the time she goes on maternity leave, the organization has already invested significantly in her through recruitment, onboarding, training, development, and progression. She has accumulated expertise, built relationships, and developed institutional knowledge. Perhaps she is already managing a team, leading important projects, or being considered as part of the organization's future leadership pipeline.
Then she goes on maternity leave. While she is away, the organization continues to evolve. Teams change, priorities shift, new systems are introduced, and people are promoted or move on. Her own life changes fundamentally, too. When she returns, it is therefore unrealistic to expect that she will simply pick up where she left off, as is still widely assumed. She needs time to reintegrate and readjust to all the changes that have occurred.
Yet organizations often approach the return as though it were a straightforward continuation. This is where the gap between policy and experience can become significant.
A woman may return without having had meaningful conversations about her role, expectations, workload, flexibility, or longer-term career. Her manager may want to support her but feel unsure about what to say or do. The organization may have excellent policies, but no structured framework for translating those policies into a successful re-entry.
The result is that an experience that should be carefully managed can become highly dependent on the individual manager, team, or circumstances. Ultimately, that can become a retention issue.
I recently worked with a client who had a strong relationship with her manager and was looking forward to returning from maternity leave. While she was away, her team was restructured. Her manager chose not to tell her because they “didn't want to bother her” during her leave.
The intention was considerate, yet the outcome wasn't. She returned to find herself in a new team without understanding why the decision had been made or what it meant for her future. Instead of feeling ready to return, she was questioning whether she wanted to return at all and was already considering leaving.
This is what happens when good intentions aren't supported by a clear framework. Even a strong manager-employee relationship cannot replace the structure needed to navigate complex transitions well.
The data points to a significant retention opportunity
The 2024 From Labour Ward to Labour Force study by The Female Lead and Peanut surveyed more than 8,000 women across more than 100 countries and provides a useful indication of what is at stake.
The research found that 35% of returning mothers considered their work setup unsustainable. Among women who were dissatisfied with the support they received from their employer, 47% planned to leave their job within the following year.
The contrast among women who felt supported is particularly striking. Seventy percent said that support made them feel more loyal to their company. They also reported being 20% more committed and 30% more confident than the average returning mother.
The research does not establish that a particular maternity transition programme causes these outcomes. But it does highlight an important relationship, the experience women have when returning to work is connected to how they feel about their employer, their commitment, and their confidence.
For Human Resources (HR) leaders, this should be a significant talent strategy insight.
When an experienced woman leaves at this point in her career, the organization doesn't only lose an employee, but potentially years of investment, valuable institutional knowledge, relationships, and future leadership capacity.
The cost of replacing experienced talent can also be substantial. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) cites estimates ranging from 50% to 200% of annual salary to replace an employee, depending on the role and level. The financial cost is only part of the equation. There is also lost productivity, the time required to recruit and onboard a replacement, the knowledge that leaves with the employee, and the impact on the wider team.
This makes the return from maternity leave an interesting, and often overlooked, point of intervention.
From maternity policy to talent strategy
The conversation about maternity at work has traditionally focused on the leave itself, how long someone will be on leave, what they are entitled to, and how their work will be covered. But if organizations are serious about retaining female talent and strengthening their leadership pipelines, the conversation needs to extend beyond the leave.
The real question is, therefore, whether an organization creates the conditions for her to return successfully and continue progressing afterward. That requires a shift from thinking about maternity leave as an isolated HR process to viewing maternity as a broader career transition.
Before leave, there is an opportunity to prepare both the employee and manager, clarify expectations, and create a thoughtful handover. During leave, there is a need to maintain the right level of connection without creating pressure or an expectation to work. At re-entry, the focus needs to move towards rebuilding connection, resetting expectations, and creating the conditions for a sustainable return.
And perhaps most importantly, support cannot stop after the first few weeks back.
The longer-term question is what happens to that woman's career afterward. Does she remain visible? Does she continue to have access to development and progression opportunities? Is she still being considered for leadership? Does her manager continue to invest in her?
This is where maternity transition becomes directly connected to the female leadership pipeline.
Managers are part of the solution
One of the biggest challenges is that managers are often expected to navigate this transition without having been equipped to do so.
A manager may be excellent at leading their team and delivering business results, but that does not necessarily mean they know how to guide someone through the transition into parenthood and back into work.
They may not know how to approach conversations around changing priorities, workload, flexibility, or career progression. They may worry about saying the wrong thing. Or, with the best intentions, they may make assumptions about what a new mother wants or can take on.
When there is no organizational framework, managers are left to figure it out themselves, and that creates inconsistency. Two women returning from maternity leave in the same organization can have completely different experiences simply because they have different managers.
A structured framework does not mean turning a deeply personal transition into a rigid checklist, but rather offering a foundation that creates enough consistency to ensure that the important conversations happen, while giving managers the guidance and flexibility to respond to the individual.
It moves the organization from relying on good intentions to creating a repeatable experience.
The opportunity for HR leaders
This is where I believe there is a significant opportunity for Human Resources (HR) Business Partners, People, and Learning and Development (L&D) leaders. By recognizing that the return from maternity leave is a moment when retention can be strengthened or weakened, when career progression can be supported or unintentionally disrupted, and when future leadership potential can either remain on track or begin to drift away, they can adjust their support accordingly.
Most organizations don't necessarily need a better maternity policy. They need a framework to translate the policies they already have into practice and thereby connect the dots between policy, manager capability, and employee experience.
At &BEYOND, this is exactly the gap we work to address.
We advise organizations on building structured maternity transition frameworks that support both employees and managers across the full journey, before leave, during leave, at re-entry, and beyond.
Our goal is to create the conditions for female talent to return, stay, progress, and thrive. Returning to work is not the end of the maternity transition, but the beginning of the next chapter of someone's career.
For organizations, it can be a critical moment to protect an investment they have already made in their female talent.
A strategic investment for 2027
As organizations finalize their 2027 people strategies and budgets, maternity transition deserves to be part of the conversation about talent retention and leadership development.
If you want stronger female leadership pipelines, you need to pay attention to the moments in women's careers when progression can become more vulnerable.
If you want better retention, you need to look beyond why people leave and examine the experiences that influence whether they choose to stay.
If you want business continuity, you need to think about maternity transitions as something to be actively managed rather than simply administered.
If this is a challenge you're looking to address in your organization, get in touch with &BEYOND. We'd love to explore what a structured maternity transition approach could look like for your organization.
Read more from Isabel Theissen
Isabel Theissen, Motherhood & Leadership Coach
Isabel Theissen is the founder of &BEYOND, the maternity transition consultancy. She helps organizations create more structured, sustainable maternity transitions while guiding women through the personal and professional shifts that accompany motherhood. Her approach combines professional expertise, research, and lived experience of navigating motherhood alongside a corporate career, giving her a grounded understanding of the realities of this transition. Isabel challenges the idea of a simple “bounce back” after maternity leave, instead defining the return as a leadership transition that requires structured processes and intentional support. Through &BEYOND, she helps organizations move from well-intentioned policy to meaningful implementation, supporting talent retention, strengthening leadership pipelines, and creating more inclusive, sustainable ways of working.
