Several Helpful Points For Using KIT Days To Your Advantage
The Work and Families Act was lauded as being advantageous to mums-to-be when it was introduced in 2007. After all, nine months of statutory maternity pay was available, with up to a year off work allowable. Families celebrated that they would be able to allocate more time and attention to the vital task of preparing, accepting and then raising the child during this critical period. Maternity leave is seen as a basic human right in our caring society, although it can put pressures on both employer and employee as part of an ongoing working relationship. While employers must accept that pregnancy is possible and must accept the letters of the law, they must also be prepared to take on temporary staff as necessary to account for the woman on maternity leave. Of course a certain amount of disruption can be expected, but the majority take this in stride.
There is a new clause available for the mum on maternity, allowing her to “keep in touch” through the allocation of 10 legislatively permitted days, during which she can attend work and receive a certain number of payments. This element of the legislation was introduced by Parliament to try and smooth over the disruption and the disconnection that could otherwise occur between employer and employee over this lengthy period of time.
Mum can take advantage of keeping in touch days from several different perspectives. Mum will be able to keep on top of those latest trend changes. While it is of course possible to research at home and to receive notifications, e-mails and so on while on leave, often there is no replacement for actually being at your place of employment, interacting with other staff and, for example, actually seeing how a new procedure plays out. This is a strategic way of keeping in touch and when time approaches to return to work, the employee should be “up to speed” and ready to be highly productive, once more.
Mum may have been involved with a particularly challenging project when baby called. In this case, keeping in touch days can be used to help her follow-through on this project and to use her valued skills. Otherwise, the business may suffer or in certain circumstances, mum may be at somewhat of a career disadvantage when she returns simply due to the fact that she had not been available to work on a pivotal project. By using those keeping in touch days, she would just be “behind” in terms of her time spent moving forward.
Keeping in touch also will allow mum to interact with her temporary replacement and that could potentially help to smooth over any issues or problems that may arise without this type of informal supervision.
Each “keeping in touch” day is also paid by the employer and does not affect the amount of maternity leave pay that she may have. Don’t forget that this can be a nice little boost, financially.
Make no mistake about it, sometimes an extended period away from work can be very challenging and you may need to seek out professional coaching to help you understand how to handle it. These days, online life coaching, specifically online life coaching for women, is a service dedicated to helping us understand how to cope with every distinct phase of our personal lives and business careers.
Amanda Alexander, Director of Coaching Mums, helps pressure-cooked, stressed working mums who long for more hours in the day. Through her coaching programmes and online life coaching courses, Amanda shows mums how to create fulfilling and successful lives. For your simple 5 step guide to balance as a working mum, download our free eBook today!
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
mary
