IT’S UNLIKELY to be a box-office block-buster, but the plot of a new French comedy, 48 heures par jour, should strike a chord with many women. It tells the story of a high-powered mother who juggles her family commitments at the expense of her career prospects. Fed up, she tells her husband that she is going to Japan to work for six months, only to move around the corner. Predictably her husband struggles to cope with the role-reversal and sees his own chances of pro-motion fading as hers take off once more.

It’s pure fiction, but the juggling act that women face when they return to work after maternity leave is in reality just as difficult. “The more senior the woman is, the more difficult it is to achieve flexibility,” says Amanda Alexander, the director of Corporate Mothers, a maternity coaching firm and HR consultancy. “You are probably used to working long hours so when you become a mother, it becomes very difficult to satisfy your responsibilities at work [with] childcare. Most nurseries close at 6pm. If your core hours are until 5.30pm and the average commute is 45 minutes, that doesn’t work, does it?”

As well as physical barriers such as dashing from work to the nursery every day, new mothers have emotional baggage to deal with even before they step back into the workplace: 46 per cent of women surveyed by Corporate Mothers said that they felt less confident about their ability to do their job than before maternity leave. That having a baby is a life-trans-forming event that goes unacknowledged in some workplaces does not help, Alexander says. Perhaps welcoming women back into the workplace requires a more businesslike approach? “Companies invest a lot of money in change management and it’s about the change management for women when they become mums.”

Communication and information is the key to keeping new mothers, says Sarah Bond, the director of diversity at KPMG Europe. Although 90 per cent of women return to the financial services firm after maternity leave, a consultation exercise found that women still thought that the experience could have been more positive, she says. Women wanted to be kept in touch while away on maternity leave and to know more about other mothers’ experiences when they returned. Retaining a balanced workforce is imperative, Bond says. “If we can support women returning from maternity leave and make their experience very positive, then I think that we will see [a] change in terms of the representation of women at senior levels. We don’t have enough senior women.”

Good bosses can turn on the style

Can the essence of leadership be distilled to just six styles?

BACKGROUND

• Leaders who put onus on the led

• Affiliation feels good if it works

• A new take on the big picture

• The direct route is not always best

Related Internet Links

• Snakes & Ladders

• Senior executive jobs

Multimedia

• Alpha Mummy - mother's little helper

Towry Law, a wealth advisory firm, is all too happy to recruit women that other companies have somehow misplaced. It launched a “return to work” scheme last year to recruit women interested in retraiing as wealth advisers. Wealth advisers manage their own diaries, are not office-bound and can work flexibly, which makes the role ideal for women juggling commitments at home, says Alex Rickard, its head of HR. It used Women Like Us, an employment service and social enterprise that goes into schools to find potential candidates among mothers who want to get back to work. The programme is open to men and women, but, Rickard says: “We focus on women because that is a pool of talent that is largely overlooked.”

The Times Top 50 Places Where Women Want to Work is an annual celebration of the country’s most progressive employers. Organisations in the private or public sector with 1,000 or more staff in the UK can now apply to be in the 2008 listing. To register your organisation’s interest and to receive further information, go to timesonline.co.uk/top50women. Entries close at 5pm on Friday, August 22, 2008.

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