Going on leave can be daunting, particularly if you have never taken a leave before.

We at Fourth Trimester teamed up with Career Coach Sharon Weinberg to create a free maternity leave guide to help you make a smooth transition between working and being on leave.

The maternity leave guide is useful for those who will be having a leave of one month or more, although elements of the approach can easily be used effectively for shorter absences.

This preparation can enable you to create the necessary clarity, accountability, and continued execution to strategy by you and your team during your absence and set them up for success. Paramount in the thinking and the approach is to:

(1) minimize potential disruptions to operations due to confusion of ownership, partnership, and expected action,

(2) minimize the impact on my boss, team, and partnering departments, and

(3) create stretch leadership opportunities for my team members.

Key to your success in implementing the approach will be starting early. For those with planned leaves of three weeks or more, the recommendation is to begin putting in place these or similar actions at least one month (even two) before your leave date. In this way, the necessary clarity, accountabilities, and integration can be done in a thoughtful way with sufficient time for those taking over to feel ready and secure in the expectations made of them and the actions they will take.

Maternity Leave Guide: Step-by-Step instructions for Planning a Leave of Absence

The purpose of this maternity leave guide is to lead an employee through the preparation required for an upcoming leave of absence. The outcome of good transition planning is to ensure that you, those whom you are delegating, and your key business partners (individuals, departments, vendors, customers) are clear in the actions they must take, and feel confident and empowered to do so during your absence.

Note, this maternity leave guide also works for paternity leave.

Goals

1. Ensure you have fulfilled your professional responsibilities in handing over critical information to your colleagues, direct reports and boss
2. Ensure you have enabled your colleagues, direct reports and boss to be successful while you are out
3. Ensure you have created the necessary clarity of expectations and actions for the people covering for you so that strategic and operational efforts are not disrupted

When to begin

Start your planning process as soon as you know you’ll be going on a leave of absence. The process outlined in this document can take weeks to complete in a thorough manner. Ideally, allocate time in your schedule each week at least a month before your leave to devote to the necessary planning, coordination, and communication to ensure that the people you are delegating to are clear, confident, and empowered to take action on day one of your absence.

If you don’t have a lot of planning time because your impending absence wasn’t anticipated, identify the most important efforts/workstreams/initiatives that must be covered to minimize disruption of progress or unintended consequences. Your goal is to make those you are delegating to feel adequately prepared to take the reins in your absence.

1) Identify major projects and workstreams

Document what is currently in-flight and due to begin while you are on leave.

• Project Title
• Project Goals
• Project timelines; important dates
• Link to project plans, overview documents
• Link to any relevant documentation (e.g. cases, tickets, internal wiki pages)
• Dependencies on other teams

Start in a google spreadsheet, for example.

2) Identify owners for each major item

Work with your team and colleagues to identify who will be the owner as well as BACKUP owner for each project.

Update the new owners in the google spreadsheet next to each project title.

3) Owners sign off on their leadership for each item

Email the updated list to your team and other stakeholders taking over the projects. Here’s an example of what this email can look like:

Here is my thinking about how my responsibilities will be covered by the team during my maternity leave. I’ve taken the time and thought about it, and recognize this is a partnership.
Please review this. There are four areas I want you to focus on:

1. What are you comfortable taking on
2. What are you not comfortable taking on and why
3. What needs additional clarification
4. Your plan for who covers for you on each project in instances when you are out for PTO etc.

The project list is here:
(LINK TO GOOGLE SPREADSHEET HERE)

If you are expected to take over one of these projects as the new project lead, your name will show up in column ‘X’.

Please write back to me to let me know your answers to 1-4, and let me know if you need to discuss any items during our upcoming 1:1s. Once we’re all final, we will be posting some version of ‘who owns what’ on the internal company wiki, and that list will be shared with internal stakeholders so there is no question about ownership while I’m out.

In addition, PERSON will be on point as the team lead while I’m out. That means, for new issues that come up, they will work with everyone on re-prioritizing and project ownership/distribution as needed.

I am confident that we’re in a strong position, and that everyone here is capable and well-positioned to succeed. Thank you for being the amazing team that you are. I’m looking forward to heading out with a solid plan in place, knowing that we are clear, our stakeholders are clear, and that you are confident in roles and protocols during my absence.

We can discuss all of this during upcoming 1:1s and team meetings as needed.

4) Communicate your plan broadly

Once the new project leads have signed off on their ownership, document the list on a shared wiki or share the spreadsheet itself with all internal teams impacted by the projects. Here’s what that email could look like:

Hi teams,

1. Here is my schedule for the coming weeks through my leave:
October 7th – 18th: Working from home (occasionally will be in the office as needed)
October 21st – Feb 14th: Maternity leave
If there’s anything you need from me before I head out, please let me know sooner rather than later.

2. Here is who will be owning each major H2 initiative for TEAM NAME:
LINK TO PROJECT OVERVIEW WITH OWNERS
Please bookmark this page and go directly to the project owner(s) when you need to collaborate.

3. PERSON NAME (PERSON EMAIL) will be handling ad hoc requests coming into TEAM NAME while I’m out. Please sync with them and they can work with you if priorities need to shift.